The Dandelion Market
Eamon and his friends Richie, Tommy and Hugh realised that Dublin needed a street market.
So on Saturday April 11, 1970, outside his flat on Pembroke Lane, the Dandelion Market was born. For £6 you could rent a trestle table and sell anything as long as it was legal.
It was an instant success.
At the time, Dubliners bought their shirts in Clery's and trousers in Arnott's. The Dandelion offered tie-dyed T-shirts, loons (elephant-flared trousers with no pockets or belt loops), a crios (a braided belt with tassels), studded leather watchstraps that were wider than your watch, cheesecloth shirts and, of course, sheepskin coats.
Regular stall-holders became celebrities: Dave T-Shirt, Jim Hamburger, Marie Black & Blue and many more. Cathy Larkin made them all blue denim money aprons, with a bright yellow dandelion sewn on.
But in 1971 Dublin Corporation moved them to the private car park in Leeson Close - and now they opened on Sundays as well as Saturdays.
Before long they had outgrown that site, and in 1973 they moved to the former Taylor-Keith bottling plant in St Stephen's Green, where the shopping centre now stands. Using the old stables, mews and courtyard, the market doubled in size, with many of the stalls as permanent fixtures and most of it indoors.
For six more years the market flourished. On May 12 1979, a young band called U2 played one of their first gigs in the courtyard. By September of that year the market was closed down as preliminary works for the St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre were started. Attempts were made to replicate it and start elsewhere but its time had passed.
Ironically, it should not be forgotten that many of the most conservative and successful businessmen and women today once traded with just a denim apron with a yellow dandelion sewn on.
- Rory Egan
