In blind old age, Dublin’s most famous gunslinger, the legendary street character Bang Bang, recalls decades roaming the streets of Dublin, which became Dodge City in his mind as he fought imaginary gun battles with bushwhackers and banditos with the large key he carried in his pocket as a pistol.

Amid his fantastical tales, Bolger subtly weaves in his real life story, as Thomas Dudley, raised in a Cabra orphanage. A teenage girl sets out to entice the boy she wants to marry on an unfinished street corner in Cabra, after her family are given a new house there in 1941 following the destruction of their old home when a Nazi plane bombed the North Strand, causing a conflagration that tears apart an old Dublin community. John Bell, a twenty-year-old Finglas-born soldier in the First World War, recalls the village of his birth while awaiting execution at dawn in France in 1915. A century later, in the same suburb, a teenage girl sits beside an ancient stone cross to remember how her missing father intimated that she had hidden gifts just waiting to be found.

These four richly evocative monologues were commissioned for Dublin’s Culture Connects: The National Neighbourhood. In them, Dermot Bolger conjures up reimagined lives from the rich tapestry of Dublin life over the past century; stories that conspire to be humorous, mesmerising, shocking and deeply moving, written by one of Ireland’s finest writers, hailed as ‘a master storyteller’.