Michael McAuliffe posed the rhetorical question in the July ‘NewsFour’: what would we know about poverty? Us, the college-educated product of middle class families living in our expensive Dublin 4 houses.

Michael then went on to describe vividly the deprivation and squalor he regularly saw in inner-city Dublin during his days as a Vincent de Paul volunteer. And many of us who live in this area can remember when poverty and deprivation were very real and very close, and when the relatively recent ‘Dublin 4 image’ was not even a glint in estate agents’ eyes.

I was a Star of the Sea boy in the early nineteen fifties, and then as now, that fine school drew its pupils from a wide catchment area. My pals came from Aylesbury Road and Sydney Parade, but they were also the sons of dockers and stevedores from Liffey-side addresses.

These were the boys whose family income depended on whether there was a ship needing to be unloaded, and whether some ganger would choose their da to get that work. Or they were the boys whose fathers had emigrated, and who depended on the few bob from England.

These were the boys who came to school dressed, winter and summer, rain or hail, in thin soled canvas runners, hand-me-down pullovers, often without elbows, and sometimes, quite literally, with the arse out of their trousers.

At lunch break they would, if they were lucky, unwrap a couple of slices of bread with sugar. As I finished my own lunch, I had to be careful to eat only two thirds of my apple. “Save us your butt, please. Ah, go on, Devitt you know me.”

Living and being educated in this area was a constant and almost unconscious lesson in the social and economic divisions that existed, and of course still exist, in our community. But it left one open, rounded and comfortable in the company of people from all strata of society.

Growing up in the middle of an area with as mixed and diverse a section of the population as ours was a healthy and natural introduction to society in general.

Probably around the nineteen seventies, with the beginnings of national economic improvement, and the realisation that new, far-flung housing estates were not the Elysian Fields they were meant to be, there arose the image in the minds of outsiders that what was now called Dublin Four was in fact a very pleasant and convenient area in which to live. It was also becoming perceived as trendy, fashionable and highly desirable as an address.

Property prices rose accordingly, and at the same time a media-driven image of Dublin Four as being not only a postal code, but also an attitude to life, or a state of mind, was painted in the minds of less fortunate mortals who lived beyond the Pale

All this conceit and publicity was generated with very little cognisance of the history of those of us who had lived in this area for generations, and who were not necessarily trendy, fashionable, wealthy or media-influenced.

Of course, nobody minds being associated with a largely positive concept and, whisper it, don’t we all give thanks we were born on the ‘right’ side of the Liffey, but many of us have to smile tolerantly when we come across the shallow picture of our area that still exists in some minds.

Thankfully, there are not too many young fellows or girls being sent to school in ragged pullovers now. But most of us who read this newspaper live in an area of great social and financial variations, where significant poverty and disadvantage is still in many people’s living memory, and where community values and neighbourliness is still more important than property values.

Above: Dockers from the Ringsend area in a Corporation ferry about 1950. A precarious and often dangerous job, it contrasted with the lifestyles of many better off Dublin 4 residents.