Ruth Medjber: If your home town has gone to the dogs, stop whining and do something about it

When I was 19, I was a poor student. I lived above a fish market just off Capel Street (and if the smell of rotting fish on a hot summer day didn’t put me off Dublin, nothing would). I survived mainly on cheap pints in Sin É and the food I scavenged from my parents’ house each week when I visited to do my washing.

It was about this time that I first heard Emmet Kirwan’s poem Just Saying . The poem is a beautiful love letter to Dublin that’s very critical about our capital city in the way only one written by a Dubliner can be. A few lines in it have haunted me since its publication in 2009.



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