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It was an extremely rough-shodden place for the f
irst twenty years, FitzGerald says. “The roof used to leak a lot. It was a 19th Century building and would be extremely cold in January and February.” But it was packed, says Billy Armstrong as he stands by a rack of shoes inside the front entrance. After taking a query about a pair of boots from an elderly woman, Armstrong walks over to a crevice between two shelves, producing a laminated photograph of a scene from Meath Street in 1983. It shows a throng of people out on the road, streaming into the market, which was being advertised by a long white banner that was hung across the street. Steel barriers had to be erected along the footpath. “You couldn’t get into it,” he says. “The crowds in here were fuckin’ unbelievable,” Mooney says. “You nearly had it like Ikea, going the one way around. Fantastic, it was.” Business started to slow around the early 2000s, he says. “But look, look around at the shops that are closing. My daughter was in Argos. They’re all gone. No matter where you’re going, the shopping centres are half empty. People don’t have the fuckin’ money, they don’t have it.” “The only reason we’re still going is because I have the wool for cheap,” Mooney says. “Most my customers are elderly people. I call them recycled teenagers. They don’t have the money. You have to go with the flow here, and jesus, look after the customer.” “Every year, I say to me daughter Renee, we have to get tins of sweets for them all,” he says. “And sure, some of the customers come in and say ‘no one ever does this for them in the shops.’ It’s only a tin of a fuckin’ sweets. Give to get all the fuckin’ time in this life, ya know what I mean?” Behind a plexi-glass and steel shield, Pat Clare prepares a few cups of tea for some of the traders. He passed them through a small opening over his desk. “I do all the teas and coffees,” he says. “I don’t like not being busy, and I’ve pretty much assigned everyone a mug.” Dangling behind him are an assortment of wires. USB chargers for phones. HDMI cables. Beside him are about a dozen boxes filled with sachets of instant soup. On display outside his shopfront are old portraits from around the city, like O’Connell Street when it was known as Sackville Street, and retro advertising signs. A trio of vintage-style hair clippers are spread out on a shelf, next to an orange cubeshaped homemade Bluetooth speaker. “I like to make stuff, like LED signs. I’ll take an old frame and turn it into a Heineken sign.” Clare started trading roughly twenty years ago, he says. “I was bringing in all this crazy stuff, the kinda gear people were overselling on these spy-websites. A lot of me started calling me James Bond, or the Gadget Man. The kids were all fascinated by this gear. It was the time when all the kids were saying ‘whopper’, and they’d be saying ‘oh, that’s 26 whopper.’ So, I decided then to call the place Whopper Gadgets.” One of the consistent attractions is an old Nokia phone – “the Blockia” – from the early 2000s and beloved for its near-indestructability, that he puts on show, and which is still sealed in a now yellowing plastic box. “When everyone goes by, folks, even the young kids, they look at that as ‘wow, that’s amazing,’ because while they still exist, they don’t,” he says with a proud smile. “I think there are two of them online that you can buy. Both of them are mine. If you can try to get them anywhere else, you can’t, because that’s how rare they are.” “That type of thing, you could have stuck in an auction and made loads,” he says. “But that’s there, because it adds to the character here.” Inside the front entrance, somebody had hung a single row of shiny plastic bunting announcing the market’s fiftieth anniversary. Beneath the archway too, declaring that this was “Dublin’s Famous Liberty Market,” another metal sign had been erected, informing locals in green and orange letters that the place had been active for five decades now. There had been a reporter in from the Irish Independent in recently, Larry Mooney says on Thursday afternoon. “I’d said to him, we must be doing something that was better to last fifty years. There’s not many places who could say they did that. You know what I mean” The traders were organising a party for 21 October, and whether deliberate or not, the event serves as a milestone, marking the end of one era, and the start of another. Only a fortnight earlier, Dublin City Council had concluded a series of public consultations as part of its plans to regenerate Meath Street. Their plan is to carry out a series of public works, changing the footpaths and carriageway, and introducing street furniture and trees. It isn’t an idea that is fully welcomed, said one woman sat just inside the front entrance with one of her friends on Saturday evening. “They want to make it more touristy, like Temple Bar, but the tourists don’t spend,” she said. “They don’t spend,” says the other. Meanwhile, Michael FitzGerald has plans to construct a mixed-use development, including three residential blocks with twenty apartments. His application went before An Bord Pleanála in May 2022. But while a decision was due that September, thirteen months later, there has been no sign of either permission or a refusal. It’s all on hold at the moment, he says. “Obviously, that would involve a certain amount of disruption. But you know, having chatted with the traders, I think most people are prepared to put up with a bit of disruption in order to get this better in the end.” If it goes through, he foresees an updated market, one with more specialist food stalls, comparable to the English market in Cork, “It was the time when all the kids were saying ‘whopper’, and they’d be saying ‘oh, that’s whopper.’ So, I decided then to call the place Whopper Gadgets.”