Kevin Kearns, the acclaimed author of Dublin Tenement Life and other oral histories, has now prepared a masterly work of reminiscence, celebration and sadness. Based on interviews he has conducted during LDEPual visits to Dublin extending over thirty years, he has drawn together a unique picture of women's lives in the old Dublin slums. Tall town houses, originally built as elegant homes for the rich in the eighteenth century, fell into the hands of avaricious and pitiless landlords who filled them to bursting point with ...
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Kevin Kearns, the acclaimed author of Dublin Tenement Life and other oral histories, has now prepared a masterly work of reminiscence, celebration and sadness. Based on interviews he has conducted during LDEPual visits to Dublin extending over thirty years, he has drawn together a unique picture of women's lives in the old Dublin slums. Tall town houses, originally built as elegant homes for the rich in the eighteenth century, fell into the hands of avaricious and pitiless landlords who filled them to bursting point with the desperate and impoverished urban proletariat. Conditions were often unspeakably vile with massive over-crowding and utterly inadequate sanitation. Yet out of these dreadful tenements families were reared, households kept together and human dignity maintained. women, the mammies and grannies of the Dublin slums whose voices course through this remarkable book. They tell of how they lived, of the difficulties they faced, of the grinding poverty, the unemployment, the fecklessness of their men folk and always of their heroic struggle to maintain the basic decencies of human life in inhuman conditions.
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