The idea of Dublin with Giya came about because my talented daughter won a Nikon/British Journal of Photography prize - Female in Focus. It involved two showcase exhibitions, one in London and most recently in Dublin at the International Centre for the Image. Did I want to come too, she asked.
I jumped at the chance. A few days with my daughter, the city of grandparents, uncles and aunts I'd known nothing about until a decade ago, that address I had for them...
My plane was caught up in the nanosecond that shut down air traffic control and so I lost most of a day and I admit I wasn't very organised, although I had packed Census results.
We made the private view in docklands, which is like all docklands, the gallery down a staircase through a pavement, opening out underground with three rooms of amazing images.
Giya's work, ahead of the curve, investigates data centres and the impact they have in water-deprived, power-deprived communities in South Africa. I hadn't really much of a clue about what to do in Dublin. I'd been dealing with the usual right up to when I left so a lot of the time we meandered through the busy centre, grateful for the occasional park. The museums are dark, the streets are busy, the buskers very loud. We went to the National Museum to marvel at ancient gold. We hurried through Temple Bar.
We went to the other National Museum site, based in a barracks, and there were poems by Paula Meehan - so right, so much more interesting than anything in the display cases that I felt I'd been woken up and it was as if they steered me to the Liffey, to the address I had for my grandfather and his brothers, sisters, his parents, an address that doesn't exist anymore because it was a tenement which became a gap in the street. I thought there might be something new and there was - a side street off the site of the main street which once had the word Lower attached and led down to the quay. Perhaps I should have taken a photo of the gap, but I lost heart in the traffic, noise, grime.
So Dublin, I'm not sure when I'll be back, but thank you for welcoming my daughter and thank you County Wicklow for Greystones, where we climbed a hill, looked at the Atlantic and had a sauna. We sat for an afternoon in scorching heat looking over a beach, cormorants in the water, a mother and child, dogs, like any old fashioned holiday town. We didn't see Trump that week. We heard some music, we looked at Arran jumpers. I suspect real Dublin takes a while to find and a bit of dedication.
And then on the coach back to the airport I was reminded of a priest who terrified the life out of me at the age of eight, speaking of this....
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