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“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and even if we’ve lo
st battles, we haven’t lost the war. So you have yer good days and bad days, but overall, we’re holding on.” Boots. Lamps. Laughing Buddha figurines. Hair clippers. Prime Energy drinks. Tubes of Crest toothpaste. T-shirts with ethereal wolves. Cardigan buttons and balls of wool. Eighty-year-old Turkish salt bags. Hash pipes. Communion dresses. Argentinian football jerseys with Messi printed on the back. Opal rings, jade necklaces and a grotto made entirely of purses and handbags. The labyrinthine Liberty Market at the top of Meath Street promises “everything under one roof,” according to the mural painted around its corner on Engine Alley. Its sheer scale is not apparent to someone casually passing down the street in the heart of the Liberties. The view from the opposite footpath seems to promise just a single line of stalls through the blue metal arch above the entrance, declaring its local renown. But the t-shaped interior spreads out behind the businesses to either side of it, like it is wrapping both arms around these neighbours. Inside is an overwhelming expanse of shelves, tables and metal grids, onto which all host of goods hang. There are few immediately visible signs that bear the names of their respective businesses. So instead, generally the best marker for orienting a browser are the familiar faces behind the different stalls. But even they tend to wander about, checking in to chat with their fellow traders. “The owner, he said this was purposely made to be like a maze,” says a woman named Jacinta whose stall offers a range of BB guns and glass bongs deep within the hodgepodge. “It’s so maybe you would have to go around the whole market,” she says, while demonstrating how to cock a black airgun, modelled on an automatic Beretta pistol. “Because you can’t find right away what you’re looking for, where you’re going.” 24 Michael FitzGerald was a music student in Trinity College when he co-founded the Liberty Market in October 1973. “The only real shops in Dublin at the time were the big department stores,” he says in a nearby coffee shop on a bright Friday morning, almost exactly fifty years later. “There was Clery’s. Frawley’s on Thomas Street. You had the big shops and corner stores. But few vogue-type shops.” FitzGerald was from Kinsale. He moved to London for work after finishing in school, and then, he enrolled at Trinity when he was twenty-one. Meath Street was relatively run down in the early ‘70s, he says. “It was on a par with Francis Street.” The building which later became the market was an old coal store, which FitzGerald repurposed in partnership with a woman from Cork who he refers to as Mrs. Roche. “It was a joint effort and then she died after a few years, and I kept it up,” he says. Most of the area didn’t have a roof when they started up, FitzGerald says. “And I had an old van, and was going around the scrap yards, getting second hand corrugated iron and timber.” From what he was able to glean, he roofed the building, and created supporting columns. While he was up over the entrance, hammering nails into timber, a man in his forties named Harry Armstrong approached him. Armstrong asked FitzGerald what he was doing, “and I said ‘well, this is going to be a market.’” As FitzGerald remembers it, Armstrong pulled a fiver out of his pocket. “And on the spot, he said, ‘I want the one on the front,’ and I said down to him, ‘that’s grand.’ The money went straight into buying more timber, he says. The first person to acquire a stall, Armstrong started to sell shoes on the third Saturday that they were open. “He’d say, ‘I sell the shoes, the best shoes’,” says FitzGerald. His shoe shop remains the first business that greets people as they step inside, and Armstrong continued to run his stand up until he died at the age of 96. Armstrong was in every single day that the market would be open right up until he passed away, says Billy Armstrong, Harry’s son, who now operates his father’s stall. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday, he was in, and the only reason we knew something was wrong was because he hadn’t shown up by twelve on the day it happened.” The longest serving trader is Larry Mooney. Seventy-seven years of age, for five decades now, he has run Larry’s Wool, with his daughter now a part of the business. It started after his brother took a stall on Thomas Street, Mooney says, while sat in his rollator next to his shelves and cubby holes filled with wool, and racks carrying knitwear. “I had gone into give him a hand, and then I came out to see what this was. It was in bleedin’ bits. The roof was hanging off, and I just decided to take a stall right here.” Jacinta