Part of the Night: The Lee Dunne Papers

‘Things were happening all the time on The Hill. Babies were being born to people who couldn’t afford to keep themselves. Old people were dying, most of them in poverty and loneliness from which death could only be a welcome release. And all over the place governments were coming and going like snuff at a wake and people were saying this would happen and that would happen now that the war was over.’ 

This is the world that Lee Dunne introduces his reader to in his bestselling book Goodbye to the Hill (1965). Here, he follows an unnamed protagonist who wrestles with his alcoholism, the complexities of his familial relationships and the suffocating grip of Irish institutions; a society on the cusp of transformation. Yet The Hill was no imagined place; it was the name given to an area in Ranelagh in which Dunne was born in 1934, in a tenement slum called the Mount Pleasant Buildings (The Hill pub now marking its location).

His childhood there, as well as his raucous young adulthood, would serve as the backdrop of many of his works. His views on the place oscillated in Goodbye to the Hill, describing it as ‘a scab, a sort of dry sore on the face of Dublin’, yet also a place where, when a childhood friend died, the local children walked behind his coffin because ‘it was all that any of them could do and they did it with a heart and a half’. The line between Dunne’s life and his writing was constantly blurred, and nowhere is this clearer than in his papers, which have recently been so generously donated to the National Library of Ireland and are now available for consultation in the Manuscripts Reading Room.

In the wake of Goodbye to the Hill’s publication, Dunne became ‘Ireland’s most banned writer’, a label he wore with pride, at one stage handing out free banned copies of his books on Grafton Street. While his interest in addiction and sexuality attracted censorship, his daring style and wit drew admiration from others in the literary world; a letter from Alan Sillitoe in the collection described Dunne as a writer ‘with all the stops pulled out.’  

What is particularly striking about the collection is how prolific Dunne was, writing hundreds of scripts for radio, stage and screen, magazine articles and short stories. Sorted, arranged, catalogued and housed in the NLI Special Collections, this collection provides a broad survey of Dunne’s work. He wrote his ideas and research on scraps of paper, half-finished notebooks, even the back of a poster for one of his plays ‘Off Beat’. This particular item has been restored by the NLI Conservation Intern, Clodagh Burns. 

Dunne’s work in stage and film forms a prominent part of the collection, providing insights into how the writer negotiated the finances, production and content of his work. In one case, for a staging of Goodbye to the Hill staging in America, Dunne provided the actors (including one Kelsey Grammar) with a glossary of Dublin slang, including explanations for ‘one and one’ (fish and chips) and ‘sleeveen’ (a sneak) among other more colourful words that were key to stepping into the world of Lee Dunne’s Dublin.  

Goodbye to the Hill would become one of Ireland’s longest running plays. Later, Dunne licensed three of his plays (Goodbye to the Hill, Does Your Mother! and Tough Love) to the Drama League of Ireland to allow amateur stagings of his works around the country. 

Dunne’s personal papers not only reflect the day-to-day of a working writer, but also a man who struggled against his demons and strove to be better. In 2004, Dunne graduated with an MA in screenwriting from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire (IADT). Having originally left school at thirteen, this was a cherished achievement, with his student card treasured as ‘one of the most important things I’ve ever had’. He fastidiously recorded the number of masses and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he attended over a period. ‘I trust myself’, Dunne wrote repeatedly in his diary, ‘I trust myself’. Like his ubiquitous Hill, his contrasting mixture of vulnerability and endurance is what makes Dunne’s work so lively. Dunne’s papers create a fascinating snapshot of a working writer in the latter half of the 20th century in Ireland. These diaries, drafts and papers are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in urban Dublin life, the perils of addiction, and the redemption of recovery. 

This new collection is now available for consultation in the National Library of Ireland Manuscripts Reading Room.