A Dublin crime story

An incident that happened 30 years ago today, traditional masculinity, and Daniel Penny

Thirty years ago today, I was accosted by a junkie on a dark side street in Dublin’s Temple Bar. It was my 19th birthday, and I was — new to the city and in my first term at university — looking for the Blue Notes jazz bar, to celebrate with two college friends.

I have written about Dublin a few times now, including a bit about its rough character. If you have any fiddly-dee notions about Ireland’s capital, I will now disabuse you of them. The city has it’s charms, sure. But it’s had a serious drug problem since the 1980’s; it’s cold and wet; and if a city could be personified, Dublin would be a fishwife or a street hawker. Characterful but slightly menacing, full of people who’d buy and sell you, and feral children who on hot days fling themselves into the pungent, sludgy River Liffey for refreshment.

Temple Bar was then and still is a raucous area filled with touristy Irish pubs and dark, narrow, cobble stone streets. On the night in question, I was with two friends, both men. The three of us were regular companions as we had all our classes together — they were both tall, very handsome, very well-educated. They were the kind of males that you would expect to find at an elite university studying English literature. One of them — let’s call him Connor — I have kept in touch with through the years, Dublin boy my age, who I last saw in 2020 when we had a friendly argument about Trump over dinner. The other one — let’s call him Malachy — I was especially close with. Malachy was an experimental art school grad who was almost ten years older than us but who, like me, had just moved to Dublin from a different part of Ireland to attend Trinity. (I wrote a bit more about this for Man’s World recently.)

That night, the three of us turned off the busy quays that run alongside the Liffey, and found ourselves on a deserted side street with few street lights.

Instead of the jazz bar, we found trouble there.