At the end of the Second World War… the city of Dublin stood poor, materially exhausted, but substantially intact… Between the end of the War and the end of the 20th century, this city was substantially destroyed. Niall McCullough, Dublin – Creation, Occupation, Destruction (Dublin, 2023), 4.
One of the places where the lost Dublin Niall McCullough refers to can still be glimpsed is in the photographs of the city taken in the 1950s and 1960s by Paddy Healy.
Born in 1916, Patrick (Paddy) Healy studied building construction in Bolton Street, a course which included both land surveying and technical drawing. After graduation, he took classes at night under Seán Keating in NCAD while working as a silkscreen printer by day, and served in the Irish army during World War II. In 1949 he joined the Land Commission as a surveyor, moving on to the Forestry Division of the Department of Lands in 1955. Having volunteered on archaeological sites during his holidays, he eventually left the security of the Forestry Division in the late 1960s to pursue a full-time career in archaeology, working as surveyor and draughtsman on excavations at High Street, Winetavern Street, Christchurch Place and Wood Quay. As a professional archaeologist, he would go on to carry out several excavations including the Viking cemetery at Islandbridge and the burial ground at Bully’s Acre, Kilmainham.
Throughout his archaeological career, Healy used photography as a recording tool and in 2001, one year after his death, his photographic collection came to the Irish Architectural Archive. It amounts to c. 3,000 images and includes extensive coverage of Dublin, as well as archaeological sites and national monuments across Ireland.
Healy’s eye was sharp, his knowledge extensive, his images focused and his subject matter telling. The Dublin streetscapes he captured – some romantic, some desolate – evoke a sense of those qualities which the late Niall McCullough noted were lost over the course of the second half of the 20th century, ‘the density and legibility of the city – its statement, its singular nature’.
