Dublin Folktales (9 page)

Fr Lucas was granted permission to transmit the remains beyond Rome and then to expose and place the blessed holy body for the public veneration of the faithful in any church, oratory or chapel. By November of the following year, 1836, the reliquary containing the remains had arrived in Dublin
and was brought in solemn procession to the church where it was received by Archbishop Murray of Dublin. People then began making pilgrimage there and praying for love to shine upon them. However, once Fr Spratt departed this world himself in 1871 at the age of seventy-six, following a lifetime of work among Dublin’s poor, public interest in the relics died away and they were placed in storage.

However, midway through the twentieth century, more than 100 years after they were first brought to Dublin, they were returned to prominence, when an altar and shrine were constructed to house them and to enable them to be viewed once more. Acknowledging that establishing absolute provenance of the remains would be difficult the authorities say, ‘The Reliquary contains some of the remains of St Valentine – it is not claimed that all of his remains are found in this casket.’ The small vessel tinged with the blood of the martyr is included according to the order.

The casket is housed in a larger outer casket and is in view beneath the side altar for most of the year. The outer casket has only been opened to verify that the contents are intact. The inner box has not been opened or the seals broken, according to the order. Valentine’s Day is the big day when the reliquary is removed from beneath a side-altar and placed before the high altar in the church. A short Blessing of Rings for those about to be married is conducted at masses on that day. Valentine’s Day is linked with an old belief that birds are supposed to pair off and become lovers on or about that day in mid-February. While Christmas Day is a day for the family, New Year’s Day is for new beginnings, St Valentine’s Day is a day for love and lovers.

It was natural then for Tom from Irishtown to think of proposing on that day. He had been in Whitefriar Street church a few weeks earlier and was taken with the concept that the patron saint of lovers was just a few feet away from where he sat in the smooth pew. Tom rarely bothered with love and the like in real life. He was a film addict and preferred
his experiences of life at a distance in darkened cinema. Mousie, on the other hand, never went to the cinema. Her baptismal name was Margaret though she was never called that. It was a while now since she had been a blushing maiden and had decided this year that she would rather have one bird in the hand than many in the bush. She began to think about a likely life companion for herself.

She liked Tom who came into her bicycle shop now and then to have his bicycle repaired. He was always polite and grateful and paid whatever the tariff was without comment, even when he knew she had added a little over the odds to the bill because she knew he would not complain.

Tom for his part, had eyes for Betty who ran a craft shop down the street. But Betty wasn’t fussed about Tom, though she knew that his late mother was rumoured to have won a tidy sum on the lottery. If she did, she had never spent a penny of it, so it was likely Tom was a wealthy man. Apart from visits to the cinema, Tom liked to watch sales channels on television. It was while watching an exciting jewellery presentation on a buy-now sales channel that he made a decision that would change his life. He would propose to Betty on St Valentine’s Day and see what she’d have to say about that.

They had never been on a date. Or, for that matter, had they ever conducted a conversation of any great length. To Tom’s way of thinking, this was to his advantage, for there would be no past misunderstandings to be rid of before they began their new life together. So he picked out a nice pair of
earrings on a TV show for Betty’s engagement present. He suspected there might have been something wrong with his television when the earrings arrived in the post a week later. They would have rattled around inside a matchbox with space to spare, they were that small. But the sellers had filled up the package with lots of nice soft tissue. Suppressing his disappointment, Tom thought a nice necklace would set the earrings off nicely.

As for a ring, Betty could choose a ring herself in the jeweller’s later on when they had decided to tell people about their engagement. Come the big day, St Valentine’s Day, Tom was sporting a new haircut and went past Betty’s busy craft shop several times without going in. He had the earrings and the necklace ready in his pocket but anytime he looked into the shop, Betty was dealing with another customer.

At this point, he thought better of his original plan of just walking in and putting the question to her. She might not hear him. Best to leave it until she was closed and she was at home. It would be more special then: private, romantic even. That was the plan, but like many a suitor before him, his St Valentine’s Day venture came unstuck.

He called to the house. He rang the bell. Before it was answered he heard a voice inside that surprised him and almost made him run away. Tom was sure that Betty lived alone, so who was the older man standing before him who had answered the door?

‘Can I help you?’ asked the man.

‘Is she there herself?’ Tom asked, playing for time.

‘If you’re here for my daughter, you had better come in while she gets ready.’ Later Tom learned that the man was the girl’s father, returned from a long stay in another country but back now to look after her. In the long years afterwards, Tom wondered how he had not noticed bits of bicycles lying about the house before it went too far. Betty, whom he had determined to propose to, was a craft worker
and unless she was delivering her cottages of straw on her bike, this was not Betty’s house and this was not her father. Too late.

By then, they had progressed in the conversation to the subject of Tom proposing to the man’s daughter on this special night of the year. The man said he would approve of the marriage and when Mousie suddenly appeared in the doorway, Tom didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that he was in the wrong house and about to propose to the wrong woman. So, he let St Valentine guide him.

Things turned out alright in the end. Tom never had to pay to have his bike repaired again, once they were safely married. Mousie’s father helped Tom spend all of Tom’s mother’s hidden cash and Betty up the road went on making artefacts for sale while she waved to Tom as he walked slowly past her shop on most days of the year, St Valentine’s Day included. Some relics are hard to lose. Tom has never returned to the church on Whitefriar Street to say a prayer. No point really.

Dubliners very rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story. For instance, the best English in the world is spoken in Dublin, according to most Dubliners. It is therefore a source of mystery to most of them why other English speakers cannot readily understand them and why Dublin-English is not recognised as the pre-eminent form of the language. It’s the same when it comes to a good story. It matters not what its origin may have been; if it sounds good then it is good and will be told as truth. How else could you explain why Dubliners sing about a fishmonger of doubtful provenance, as if she were a first cousin on the mammy’s granny’s side a few years back. Or even why the city council decided to erect a memorial to a street seller of fish, who probably never existed, on the city’s most prominent and fashionable street in the year 1988 that celebrated Dublin’s millennium. A birth certificate was even produced during the millennium celebrations. There was a baptism in July 1663 in St John’s Church of Ireland parish, of a baby girl of that name, more or less. Actually, the name recorded is of a Mary Malone. But sure it’s close enough for a folk tale.

Dubliners like a good argument, so there were some who said that this was proof positive of the existence of a seventeenth-century fish seller being in the city. It was proof that someone was born and baptised, right enough, but it
was a little optimistic to claim that it was proof of Molly’s existence. There were others who were sure that Molly was a nineteenth-century person. Almost inevitably, there were those who said she was neither one nor the other for she was only a girl in a nice song about her mammy and daddy dying of a fever before their time and of their daughter following in their footsteps into the next life. There were also people who suggested that the sixteenth-century Molly might have been the great-something granny of the nineteenth-century girl. This makes sense if the business was in fact a family enterprise passed down through the generations as the song clearly states.

While Molly Malone is famed in the song that relates her supposedly short but tragic life on the streets of Dublin, a darker side has crept into the folk tale over the years. Some claim that as well as selling fish, Molly was a streetwalker selling her charms for money. But they are two incompatible occupations, for one involves late nights and the other early mornings.

The city’s fish market, on a different side of the river to where her statue is now anchored, opened in the 1890s. Molly would have come here as a purveyor of cockles and mussels. In the age before refrigeration, it would have been necessary for Molly to be at the market very early. It seems like a long stretch then to suggest that she was also selling her feminine wares on the streets of the city through the night, for few prostitutes were tolerated on the streets of daytime Dublin. Molly, if she existed, needed to sleep sometime.

Traders and hawkers of all sorts wandered the streets selling their wares. According to the song Molly was a fishmonger, as were her parents before her. That much is common to all the stories of Molly Malone. They died of a fever, we are told, and Molly followed them in due course. But there is not much of a surprise there since the tight-knit houses and streets of Dublin were easy conduits for infections and fevers of all sorts.

Still, nowhere in the song is there any reference to her supposed nocturnal ramblings as her alter ego Molly Malone, good-time girl. If she did work in the world’s oldest profession then she might have found herself as one of the attractions in the sporting houses of the Monto area of Dublin. Monto was a notorious red-light district in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dublin, situated not far from the docks and the railway station on Amiens Street, now Connolly Station. It was estimated that some 1,600 women were working in the industry in the city at any time. One street was said to have some 200 young women working in brothels that were ruthlessly ruled over by madams and their fancy men enforcers. Some worked in Monto all the time and men came to them, while others travelled around the city’s fashionable meeting places to find their clients and to bring them to the kips of Monto where the men were as likely to be robbed of their wallets as anything else. Disease was rife among the women in a time of indifferent sanitation or hygienic practice. That may have lead to the inference that Molly did not die of a fever or of tuberculosis, but of a venereal disease of some sort or other. Though how this can be construed from the song that is sung all over the world is a leap into the unknown.

If a working woman did appear to be at death’s door with such a condition, she was brought to the Westmoreland Lock Hospital on Townsend Street. The lock hospitals specialised in the treatment of sexually transmitted disease. When opened first they treated both
men and women. But, from 1820 onwards, only females were admitted to Townsend Street. Males were sent to Dr Steevens’ Hospital in the west and the Richmond Hospital in the north of the city.

With so many British soldiers garrisoned in Dublin at the time, and many single men using the services of prostitutes, the authorities were anxious that communicable diseases be protected against as much as possible. Hopelessly affected women were transferred from the hospital to a Lock prison and kept there out of harm’s way until their life ended. It is unlikely that Molly met her end there. For she seemed to be an entrepreneur of the finest kind, selling her cockles and mussels to all and sundry on the streets of her home town.