A meander through South Dublin

By Tony Corcoran

It was a Halloween evening, reminiscent of the Keats season of mists and mellow fruitfulness when a vision appeared, coming towards me as I walked past the church of St Agnes in Crumlin village.

Out of the mist came a brand-new Dublin Bus, displaying the number 82. Couldn’t be, I thought. As I adjusted my focus and recovered my composure, I was transported back in time to eighty years earlier.

At that time, while the Second World War was raging in Europe, in Ireland the era was known as “The Emergency”.

Dublin city transport was provided by a combination of trams and buses which served the main roads which crisscrossed Dublin from South to North.

Most main roads still had tram tracks to topple the unwary cyclist while gradually tram routes were replaced by buses.

However, initially, the transport planners simply directed the buses along the same routes as the trams had trundled.

Then, there was a change of plan. Someone had the bright idea, now that buses didn’t need tracks, to establish a bus route that served communities and which passed through housing estates. Thus, was born the 82 bus.

At the time, I was a kid living in the Tenters area of Dublin, situated between the Liberties and the South Circular Road.

While the 82 bus was, at best, irregular and unpredictable, it passed by our houses.

Every time an 82 bus came by, we stopped playing on the road and stood open-mouthed as it passed by.

That bus became part of the fabric of our existence. It was also a single-decker bus, small enough for our growing community.

We discovered that it would bring us to the centre of town. In the other direction it would bring us through Crumlin all the way to the posh houses of Terenure.

But for us in the Tenters area it was our bus. Our lives revolved around the infrequent comings and goings of the 82 bus as it flew past the cherry blossom trees, stirring a mini-clous of pink blossom in the air.

Then, some day, around the late 1960s, the 82 bus stopped and our hearts came close to stopping too.

Worse was to come. Some years later the route was taken over by a large ugly double-decker bus and for it to pass through the Tenters some of the cherry blossom trees had to be pruned back.

The indignity!

Now, in the year 2025 the 82 bus has been reborn. While it’s a double-decker it is, at least, an environmentally friendly engined bus. I like to think of it as a grand-son of our 82 bus, still learning and, hopefully, as mannerly as its granddad.

It’s certainly more energetic, with an extremely long route. It begins in Ringsend, setting out from the where the Liffey meet the sea.

While it won’t serve the Tenters, it still serves Crumlin.

Then, it purrs along all the way to Kiltipper at the foot of the Dublin mountains.

Dublin Bus tells us that the journey time is one hour and twenty minutes for the bus to make its way from Ringsend to Kiltipper.

I’m sure that when the bus reaches Kiltipper it will be time to relax, as it surveys the meander taken and to look back on the variety of passengers who shared its seats and entertained one another.

Then, after a breather, it’s time to recommence a new journey, this time from the mountains to the sea.