Girl About Town

A mother takes a walk with her child along Dublin’s North Wall quay. Both have auburn hair, and the water glistens a deep blue. This is modern Dublin, evident in the woman’s business-suit and the child's stroller, which must be worth several hundred euros.

It’s one of the striking images in the "Dublin, Then and Now" exhibition currently on show at the Irish Consulate in New York. The exhibition brings together images of Ireland’s fair city from 1963, and 2003, clearly showing the change that has occurred in between. The photographs, collected by the Irish American Heritage Museum, will soon tour around the country: on March 13, they move to the Commodore Barry Club in Philadelphia and after that to other Irish centers, possibly touching in at Fairfield Connecticut, Buffalo New York, Mineola and San Francisco.

Chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Museum, Edward Collins, says the exhibition is an emotional experience. “People who have a chance to see it should see it because it will move you,” he told me. “It’s a moving exhibit. The photographs are stunning: the way Marvin Koner captured life is very poignant.”

Patti Smith is a rocker, poet and memoirist and, having read her memoir "Just Kids," I can also tell you she is Irish -- in ancestry at least. She grew up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and her family was poor; she tells how as a child she would play games with her siblings, taking the roles of Catholic against Protestant.

"We fought the wars of our Irish grandfathers, the orange and the green. We wore the orange yet knew nothing of its meaning. They were simply colors."

When Smith moved to New York, aged 20, she was homeless and a little lost. Soon, however, she found a partner-in-crime, Robert Mapplethorope. He too, was of Irish-English heritage, from a devout Roman Catholic family.