Keith Ridgway & Djamel White

‘The streets were bright and gorgeous Mootie, and the people also. The city looked clean. The clarity of the air, the blue of the sky, the bold colours of the doors and the shops, the flowers on the lintels and the windowsills, on the silver wands of the streetlights. And the different sound of Dublin – it’s always such a surprise – the hum and jangle of the trams; the clickers at a certain distance like grasshoppers, further out like crickets, making the place feel always slightly warmer than it is; the bells of bicycles and carts; the ring of voices. Your left! Behind! No bother! No cars. No trucks. No buses. No roar of engines, no fumes, no clots of metal clogging the streets. You can see the long lines and curves of the roads unfurling ahead of you. The easy roll of people. The runners and carriers and carters. The frontages and slopes. The walls and the windows and the old high chimneys. The little city big with life, with faces, people meeting and passing and seeing each other. People talking and laughing. So many beautiful people. So it seemed to me anyway.’ In Keith Ridgway’s Dooneen, Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that – there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Mew has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. An unravelling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices and a single dream. 

Things are different since Tony Ward, the protagonist in Djamel White’s All Them Dogs, landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren ‘Flute’ Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic, and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one. With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute’s standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters?