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SMALL TOWN PARADE,
A photographic portrait made on St Patrick's Day, 2009. It is of our time, and the pictures it contains will come to have meaning for those who are children now and for their children's children. It is available at Blurb.com and you may take a peek at the pictures by clicking HERE.Samples from the book Gallery One | Gallery Two | Gallery 3
Keeping note...
Keeping a notebook open on details from the past led to the publication of a couple of books about my adopted town, Greystones, County of Wicklow. It was a casual business. In conversation people pass on things that they remember that we pass on to others. This is the nature of anecdotal history, often embellished and personalised it is lives but gradually becomes obscured or crowded out by layers of news experiences that occupy the mind and therefore, our conversation.
So, in noting conversations with men and women who were elders of the town, a book began to grown. They were people who had lived through hard times. Some who had seen riches before falling into a form of genteel poverty.
Until the 1990s my professional life in print and television journalism was full of time restraints. As that life began to merge with my present occupations as writer, photographer and artist I began to look further and deeper into the lively topics of the town that have by now filled many notebooks and tape.
RAILWAY ENCOUNTERS was written to celebrate the 150th year of the arrival of the railway line and is still in paperback. A superb collection of factual stories about Greystones and the railway era from the time the track was laid from Bray to Wicklow in 1855 to our time. Written by Peter McNiff to commemorated the line's 150th year of operations the book contains much new material about the steam age and William Dargan, the 'father of Irish railways'. For the first time he details the horrendous railway smash on Bray Head in 1867, the inquest and a public inquiry that exposed an attempted cover-up by shareholders of the Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford and Waterford Railway Company.
Railway Encounters by Peter McNiff
234 pages, 90 illustrations, paperback.
ISBN 0-9549561-1-7
Greystones Chamber & Greystones Town Council and Ireland's Heritage Council
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