Picture This - Frank McNally on knowing your onions, the sophistication of French scammers, and journalism with legs

Irish Times

6 days ago

A reader had appealed to me as a 'last resort', seeking help in finding an old photograph. His name is Richard Evans, and he's writing a history of his family, the Irish branch of which began in the 1880s when his great grandfather – a Shropshire lad – moved to Dublin to become a butcher's apprentice.
The apprentice later struck out on his own with shops in Baggot Street and Ranelagh, the latter beside where Humphrey's Pub still stands. When the building was redeveloped years ago, Richard salvaged the mosaic tiles on the footpath outside, bearing the name 'J.G.Evans'.
But he is now 'desperate' to find a photograph of the shop and has tried all the obvious places - including Susan Roundtree's book Ranelagh in Pictures - without success. If this column can't help him, he fears the quest is a 'lost cause'.
On a tangential note, his email also notes that the butcher later transferred the business to his nephew, one Tom Onions. An aunt of Richard's, another Onions, tells him there were three shops in Ranelagh at one time owned by people called 'Lovely, Hamm, and Onions' respectively, although he doesn't remember that himself.
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Alas, I can't confirm this either, although I dearly want to and have tried. But then, searching for a 'Lovely shop', or an 'Onions shop', or even a 'Hamm shop', tends to confuse search engines. As for asking AI to tell you more about 'Lovely, Hamm, and Onions' in Dublin 6, that's just a fool's errand.
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Also among my emails this week was one from a woman I'd never heard of before, and who didn't know my name. I immediately assumed it was spam, but it was in French. So before deleting, I mentally translated the opening sentences and was intrigued by their intellectual and philosophical tone.
They began like this: 'In death, the family does not destroy itself, it is transformed, a part of it goes into the invisible. We believe that death is an absence, when it is a discreet presence. One thinks it creates an infinite distance, while in fact it suppresses all distance, restoring to the mind what was located in the flesh…'
There was more in that vein, all of it sounding vaguely profound, at least in the original. Then at last the lady got around to introducing herself, stoically detailing the terminal illness with which she was diagnosed recently, and mentioning the €1.8 million she would now like to donate to a 'trustworthy and honest person'.
Sigh. There are scammers everywhere these days. But it's extraordinary that even fraudulent attempts to get your bank details seem to be so much classier in French.
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Further to the theme of Connacht, Hell, and Longford (Diary Wednesday May 28th), regular correspondent Damien Maguire has written to point out that the Cavan panhandle was another destination from farther north.
To this day, he says, there are families there – mostly from Donegal - known as 'Ultachs'. This even though Cavan itself is in Ulster (despite its GAA secessionist ambitions, circa 1915, to escape the baleful influence of Monaghan).
Damien also mentions in passing that although everyone has heard of the famous 1947 All-Ireland in New York, not many people know Cavan also won in New York in 1958.
This wasn't GAA, it turns out. It was a horse called Cavan, which won the prestigious Belmont Stakes that year, preventing the injured favourite Tim Tam, which had already won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, from completing America's Triple Crown.
The 2025 Belmont Stakes is next weekend, June 7th, in Saratoga. And I'm delighted to see that favourites include a horse called Journalism, which has already triumphed in this year's Preakness. I may have to risk a few dollars. It's heartening to know that, even in Trump's America, Journalism in any shape can still win.
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On a more poignant note, this week marked the 30th anniversary of the demise of the Irish Press group, a milestone commemorated by a get-together of survivors in Wynn's Hotel.
Disturbingly, that means the world has now been without Press newspapers for almost as long as it has had the Spice Girls, who have been the subject of 30th anniversary reunion tour rumours of late. Now I feel old.
The last years of the Press coincided with the start of my career as a freelance journalist, which regularly involved pulling all-nighters, as they say. And seeking to get a jump in the competition, in those pre-internet days, it sometimes helped me to get the next day's papers as soon as they were printed.
I was an Irish Times reader (although not yet working for it) by then. But having grown up with the Irish Press, thanks to a Fianna Fáil father, I still had a soft spot for that too. So, cycling into town circa 1am, I would first stop by Poolbeg Street, where bundles of the first edition Presses came rolling down a chute to the waiting vans.
It was a bonus that the lads in the Press usually gave me the paper free. Atound the corner at The Irish Times, meanwhile, they always charged.