For over fifty years, Kevin C. Kearns trekked the rough-and-tumble streets of the heart of Dublin, hoping to record and preserve the city’s vanishing oral history. Armed only with a Sony tape recorder, the ordinary people he encountered – street traders, dockers, factory workers, tram drivers, housewives and midwives, children and grandparents – shared private stories of hardship, joy, sorrow, suffering, survival and triumph.

‘Without Kevin, the lives of ordinary decent Dubliners would be forgotten. This book is a celebration of them.’ Joe Duffy