Dolly Considine’s Hotel

Author(s): Eamon Somers

Location(s): Dublin

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1983 & 1950s

Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) is an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer in need of shelter from his bullying older brother. Dolly McClean (nee Considine) runs a late-night drinking establishment catering to the needs of thirsty politicians and theatricals, in the historic catacomb district of Dublin. Julian’s chances of getting the live-in lounge assistant job look slim, until he insists on reporting the hotel robbery he and the barmaid foiled, making Dolly capitulate. He soon embroils himself in the shebeen’s gossip and the guests’ bedsheets, and turns Dolly’s entourage into fodder for his literary ambitions; making it difficult to separate reality from fantasy…

Set against the run up to the Pro-life Constitutional Amendment of September 1983 and moving fluidly between the 1950s of Dolly’s youth and Julian’s account of his Summer of Unrequited Love, the hotel becomes a stage for farce and tragedy. With a papier-mâché figure of Mother Ireland giving birth, clashing sword-wielding dancers, Julian’s fictions, Dolly’s secrets, and narrow party politics; the rich cocktail threatens to blow them and even Ireland itself, apart. And then there’s the ghosts of the chambermaid and the porter…

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