Dublin Quotes

“Whatever the muddy reality, the image of Dublin as an undefiled community of Norman/English families who had settled in the twelfth century, married amongst their own and upheld English law, customs and orthodox religion, was a compelling story.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“And it was telling that it took forty-three years to rebuild the single bridge across the Liffey after it collapsed in 1385, and that it was the abbot of St Mary’s Abbey, not the justiciar or the merchants, who eventually oversaw the construction of what was the first fully stone bridge.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“John Clyn, the contemporary Franciscan chronicler based in Kilkenny, claimed that during the four months after the plague pandemic reached Dublin and Drogheda in August 1348, 14,000 died in Dublin alone (‘xiiii milia hominum mortui sunt’), and that ‘ipsas civitates Dubliniam et Drovhda fere destruxit et vastavit incolis et hominibus’ (Dublin and Drogheda were almost destroyed and emptied of inhabitants and men). Both the archbishop and the mayor were among its victims.30”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“Thanks to the near total absence of women among early Norse invaders, genetic and probably cultural mixing was taking place from the ninth century onwards, albeit the result initially of slavery and coercion; the gradual shift in focus in religious practice from Thor to the Christian deity was probably achieved through the influence of female partners. But we now have scientific evidence that Norse Dublin had been a hybrid mix, and that despite the huge changes in store it would remain so, a place where Norse and French, Irish, Welsh and the Saxon dialects of England would all be regularly heard on the street.19”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“The silent voices, unheard even in the twentieth century–the prisoners, the institutionalised patients, the casually abused–are silent in the historical record because they had very little influence over their personal fate or their city’s shape.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“the gregarious intimacy, rare in a town of this size, the vivacious gossip, the cultural fizz, the wit and repartee at every social level . . .”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“Dublin is a big village and a dirty village where gossip reigns supreme’.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

“No city exists in the present tense,’ wrote James Stephens, Dublin journalist and poet in 1923, ‘it is the only surviving mass-statement of our ancestors, and it changes inversely to its inhabitants. It is old when they are young, and when they grow old it has become amazingly and shiningly young again.”
― David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City