How one man’s seaside dreams came true

FOR generations of day-trippers and tourists and locals Dun Laoghaire has offered enjoyable long strolls along its piers accompanied by brisk sea breezes.

A well-known stop off along the way was Teddy’s, a local institution that is not to be confused with the famous ice-cream establishment next door. It is now the Promenade Cafe on Windsor Terrace and is owned by Keith Geraghty, the bass player from Dublin band Friends of Emmett.

As a young child Keith had been brought to Teddy’s as a treat and he remembers the occasions fondly.

“When I was young my parents used to bring me to a bistro and grill called Teddy’s on the seafront of Dun Laoghaire,” he reflects. “My dad, Jim, passed away just last October and it was his dream that I own this place someday. Now I am delighted to say I took it over a few weeks back.”

After Jim died, Keith discovered a note he had left for his son with the words of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’ written on it: ‘Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it – and – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son!’. This was all the encouragement that Keith needed to realise his dreams and purchase Teddy’s.

While the young Southsider attributes his success in owing the bistro to his late father, the full story goes back to when Keith was born, in an infamous mother and baby home, his subsequent quest to find the truth and answers about his identity and how his journey has shaped the man he is today.

The tale begins when his mother Maura, a Dubliner, who was working in a London hotel one summer when she was 20, became pregnant after a fling with a Scottish lad who was also working there.

Maura returned to Ireland and was forced to have her baby in a mother and baby home before giving him up for adoption. 

She was only allowed 30 minutes by the nuns to say goodbye to the son she named Vivian before the baby was handed over to his adoptive parents, the Geraghtys.

Keith, as the child was named, grew up with his adoptive parents in Glenageary but when he was 17, he went to the Cunamh Adoption Support Services on South Anne Street in a bid to track the whereabouts of his biological mother. He had to wait an agonising eight years, until he was 25, before he was finally reunited with Maura.

When Maura first rang Keith she immediately hung up. But when she rang back and Keith answered he quipped, “I’ve been waiting 25 years and you hang up on me”.

However, the pair instantly connected and when they met found they were remarkably similar in appearance and personality. It was at this moment that Keith’s life changed forever and for the better.

Depite the passing of all the years since they had last seen other mother and son bonded and Maura is now an integral part of Keith’s life.

Keith maintains a flower and the Kipling poem tribute on table two in the restaurant where he used to sit when Jim brought him there as a boy. Only last week a bird flew into the restaurant and landed on the table. Keith believes this is proof that Jim continues to watch over him.

And now Maura regularly visits the restaurant and the bonds between Keith and his birth mother have never been stronger.