A number of people wondered who had lived in the Terrace? What their story was? Sadly, there were no answers. However, the event did bring to mind a previous demolition in 1999 when the development of Teeling Way saw the loss of a house on East Road which had been the home of Billy Woods and Nora Wooloughan. Billy and Nora were the grandparents of the poet Macdara Woods, who although born in Leeson Street, came from a long line of East Wall Sea Captains and had many childhood memories of that house. As the demolition began Woods put pen to paper to record happy childhood memories in his grandparents’ house all of which would soon be erased.

The result was the poem East Road, East Wall from his 2001 collection Knowledge in the Blood. It’s a wonderfully evocative poem of a lifestyle now lost and in tribute to the now forgotten residents of the recently demolished houses we are giving the poem below:

“East Road, East Wall” 

there was sunlight in the yard 

when I broke my toe 

five years of age 

fifty years ago 

in the hall the Japanese umbrellas 

in the parlour 

the mandolin and concertina 

 

always sunlight in the yard 

and heaps of coal 

light from the locomotives 

I know 

The heat from the fire-box 

In Westerns 

 

In the roof there were pointed windows 

behind the house 

the verandah 

trainlines leading to the docks 

down there where my green balloon 

sailed off 

all those years ago 

 

and a journey with my mother 

across Dublin 

past the Custom House –  

Oh don’t put me  

in there – I said 

don’t ever put me in there –  

three of us up 

on a donkey and cart 

moving my grandfather’s piano 

me and my mother 

and the one-armed driver 

my mother engaged –  

piano – mover with a heart condition 

 

anchored in time 

and light – a child 

in Gandon’s open space 

where my 

one-legged great-grand-uncle 

navigated yet another 

nautical academy 

the first left sailing empty 

abandoned in Belfast 

 

behind us all the afternoon 

the East Wall in the sun 

the parish register 

Of Lawrence O’Toole’s –  

recording the marriage of Wooloughan and Dias 

and where was she from I wonder 

the Iberian name at last 

the further I go 

the nearer I get 

get back to the peninsula 

travelling south to Pembroke Street 

 

travelling now to 

Clonskeagh 

half a century later 

across the river and the city 

across the Grand Canal 

(that’s my house there 

in Ranelagh 

that’s where my son lives 

and I 

hold onto this 

I think 

and that is where I was born 

down there 

in Upper Leeson Street) 

 

on the anniversary of my father’s death 

I am looking toward 

Clonskeagh 

where my mother is slowly dying 

and saying her fragments of prayers 

from childhood – oh 

in this January month 

as always 

the trees are bare 

I see too clear 

 

In the pumping station 

I paused today 

there was sunlight in the yard 

the engineer says 

there is always sunlight here 

he says –  

not true I know 

but I know what he means 

for this was a place for photographs 

on kitchen chairs 

hauled into daylight 

my people sat here 

afternoons 

 

this week 

they began to knock the house 

that was Billy Wood’s home: 

and Nora Wooloughan’s 

 

the Japanese umbrellas 

the mandolin and concertina 

the columned clock on the mantle 

their three sons 

 

the heap of coal 

the puff and steam of locomotives 

and the shaking great pump-engines 

Gone 

 

outside the bricked-up 

parlour window 

a palm tree in the earth lives on …