McGonagles, Dublin: An icon of a gloriously shabby golden age

It’s May 1988 and I’m in a small, run-down, sweaty dive in Dublin with about 500 other unusually excited music fans. Public Enemy, the biggest Hip-Hop band on the planet are about to take to the stage. A month later they will release their era-defining Nation of Millions album and they are at the very peak of their powers. It’s an extraordinary moment. The full weight of a bona fide, global musical revolution reaches in and punches Dublin in the face. The venue, of course, is McGonagles. In January of 1988 The Economist had run a feature on Ireland. Its cover featured a mother and her child, begging on a Dublin street under the damning headline “The Poorest of the Rich”. It painted a bleak picture of a country with unemployment in double figures and emigration reaching 1950’s levels. For those of us growing up in ‘80’s Dublin however this was simply our normal. Context, as they say, is everything and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. <a href="https://medium.com/@NickCD/mcgonagles-dublin-an-icon-of-a-gloriously-shabby-golden-age-cb19794f889e">Click Here</a>