In Ranelagh, two businesses remain from a time when the neighbourhood had a bit more weird

There’s a history of pranks between Redmonds of Ranelagh off-licence and SoundHire, a shop a few doors down that rents out sound systems.

The owners of these two long-established shops in Ranelagh, Jimmy Redmond and Jess Lynch, both took over from their fathers, Jim and Larry.

In the back office of the off-licence, there’s black-and-white photos tacked up showing Jimmy and his brother Aidan, who used to run the shop with him – and a painting of the old shopfront. 

On Saturday, sat at one of the desks cluttered with printed documents, Jimmy Redmond recalled a prank his dad pulled on Larry Lynch, SoundHire’s founder.

“One Christmas, we gave him a whiskey box,” Redmond says. “A Paddy’s box. And in it, we put a litre carton of milk. And we wrapped it up all nice and, you know, beautiful.”

A couple days later, down the road at SoundHire, standing in his shop cluttered with amps at closing time, upon hearing Redmond’s rendition recounted, Jess Lynch jumped in. 

“Remy Martin,” he said “Not Paddy's, so. Because the dog was called Remy.” 

But then Lynch didn’t know the end of the story.

“Larry looked at it,” Redmond had said a couple days earlier in his office. “And says, ‘Oh yeah, grand.’ Didn't do anything with it. But gave it to somebody else as a Christmas present.”

Redmond said SoundHire's founder, Larry Lynch, he said, was an early adopter, and had one of the big brick phones.

It was back when the awning was purple and yellow, so people referred to it as the “Cadburys shop”, and the windows were stacked with liquor bottles, Redmond says.

Larry Lynch would come down the road from his sound equipment shop with his new mobile phone, stand outside their shop, and ring the Redmonds’ landline. 

He’d wait for them to go all the way to the back office to answer, and then hang up, Jimmy Redmond says. Then, when they came back, he’d ring them again. 

“So we always played jokes with each other like that,” Redmond says.

SoundHire

Later that afternoon at SoundHire, Charlie Lynch, grandson of the shop’s founder, was chatting with two locals.

They were lingering between large black amps and speakers, and framed photos of his grandfather with big bands of the 1970s and 1980s: Thin Lizzy, the Boom Town Rats, Horslips, Hothouse Flowers.

The neighbours bid farewell and shuffled out of the shop. Good, said Charlie. “I’m introverted.” 

His dad, Jess Lynch, the current owner of the shop, laughed later hearing that his son had said this. 

Father and son share a cynical humour. In reality, “Charlie would talk to anybody,” Jess says. “He's real sociable. Like Dad.”

Charlie said he’s been working at the shop for forever, and he wants to take over one day. 

These days, running the shop there’s Jess, Charlie, and a third employee, John Murray Jr. He’d known Larry, the original owner, he said. 

Murray said he started working at the shop after he had “massive health problems back in 2017”.

“And Jess knew about it, and he said, ‘Why don't you come down, just hang out.’ You know, more for the social,” Murray says. 

“And I just kind of moved in then, you know, and I kind of was working here full-time,” he says. Now he does a few days, and repairs equipment.

“And, you know, people drop in junk,” Murray said. “Which I service, you know, making nothing. Doing it more for the love of it.”

Murray said he tries to keep the shop clean and hoovered, but it can look a bit chaotic. 

“Generally, this place is covered in wires, and speakers are everywhere,” he says. “It's like a bomb went off.”

Redmonds

Both Jimmy Redmond and Jess Lynch said they started working at the shops they run now as kids. Both were originally family grocery stores. 

Redmond said that around age 11, in 1968, he started cycling south Dublin to deliver customers' account bills for the family grocery store.

“When I was 16 years of age, my father woke me on Easter Sunday to tell me that I wasn't going into school on the Monday,” he says. 

“And I said, ‘Oh yeah, great. What am I doing?’ He said, ‘You're finished, you're out of school. You're coming to work in the shop for a year,’” he says.

Redmond said he didn’t mind. He wasn’t one for school, mostly just the sports. He could’ve left the shop after that year and his subsequent apprenticeship in town, but he liked the family business. 

Then, with the advent of the supermarket, small family grocery stores like his family’s needed to change. 

They decided to rebrand and specialise – get rid of any products other than alcohol. 

Redmond said the off-licence was always his favorite part: it brought a lot of earnings and was easy to manage. 

He and his brother, who eventually bought their dad out, got to travel too, sampling wines across the world, in every wine country “except Argentina”, Redmond said. 

He managed the front, and his brother managed the books. 

Red Star

Jess Lynch’s dad once ran a small grocery store, Red Star, in the 1960s, he says. 

But by the time Lynch started working there, at age four, his dad had transitioned it to providing sound equipment for gigs. 

His dad was eccentric and a musician too, one of four in the 60’s band The Drags, he says. 

“And he had hair down to his ass. And back then, nobody had long hair. The Beatles were considered to have long hair,” Lynch says.

He pointed to framed pictures on the store’s walls of his dad, still with his long ponytail in old age.

“He used to gig all over Ireland, you know. He had a little, little van. And they used to put all the gear in,” he says.

Lynch says his dad was sometimes called the “unofficial Lord Mayor of Ranelagh”. Even famous Irish people recognised Larry out, Jess said. 

“You know, because he was around,” Lynch says. “He was around for so long. And now I'm just, I'm just a blow-in.”

Murray, who works in the shop now, says “You almost get tired of people coming. ‘I remember Larry!’” 

“That's not the first time I've heard that today, you know? But you know, I can't complain. Because you know, that'll disappear at some stage,” he says.

Changes

Back at Redmonds – now lined with shelf after shelf of craft beer, and wines from around the world – Jimmy Redmond says Ranelagh is different these days. 

He could reel off all the shops that are gone from memory, who was there, what was where. 

People have more money now, they shop differently, get to-go meals at Tesco instead of going home for lunch, he says. 

For Jess Lynch at SoundHire, the difference is more pronounced. “Ranelagh used to have loads of nuts in it. But it's gone fierce posh now, you know,” he says.

“It's all high-end,” he says. “There was none of these restaurants or any of that. It was all just like, there was next door here – was a curtain shop, and then it was a laundrette.”

There are big fancy houses where there used to be tenements, nobody is out at night. “There used to be a nightclub where the SuperValu is now.”

Both Jimmy Redmond and Jess Lynch sprinkle stories of characters from Ranelagh’s past into their recollections. 

They each take little time to independently bring up a man – Jess motioned to a picture of him on the wall – who was always around the area with a bike that had no tires or saddle.

“And he just cycled the bike. Or like he walked with the bike, all the time,” he says. “Larry christened him Stephen Roche, after the Irishman who won the Tour de France [in 1987].”

Then there was “The loud, old kind of professor-type guy, he did do a lot of roaring and shouting here in Ranelagh, but he was a little posh. You know, he died,” he says. 

“We just would have a little bottle of vodka in the window to clean the heads of the tape decks with,” he says. “He comes stealing in and he takes the lid off, and you take a little sip, and you put the lid on. He goes, ‘Thank you.’” 

He’d also sees a couple he calls Pom Pom and Sheila pretty much everyday, Jess Lynch says.

“They'd sit up at the Palmerston Park, and had a record player with batteries in it, and they'd play Frank Sinatra,” he says. “They'd sit there drinking tea and drinking booze on the bench, and then sleep in the park.”

Then there was “The Gardener”. “He used to go around with a big billboard saying, ‘Save the Swans’ on a placard. And he'd be walking up and down, and it looked like, you know, the professor from Back to the Future,” Lynch says.

They're all gone years, now Lynch says. 

The future

Jimmy said when he’s done, that’s that for Redmonds. No more pranks – at least with SoundHire.

He said his kids don’t want it. They like their lives, and a 9-5 doesn’t have the demands of running a shop like this, where the problems always fall on him. 

“When I do go, I won't miss it, but I will miss the connections of it. So I'll still miss the people that come in now, still miss the interaction with customers and stuff like that,” Redmond says.

Despite Jess Lynch’s acerbic account of how Ranelagh has completely been transformed over his lifetime, he constantly has people he knows dropping in.

A man with dyed blonde tips and a cheeky smile, pops his head through the front door.

“This is Jason, the local window cleaner,” Lynch says. 

Jason started cleaning the windows before asking Lynch whether he should go ahead. He kept putting his head in, with more stories, little quips, whatever came into his mind.

Lynch grew tired of it. “Can you not see him in the middle of something? How about you just go and fuck off. Yeah. Later. Fuck right off.” 

Jason didn’t listen, and soon the two were struggling against the door. Jess eventually shoved Jason out of the shop.

It didn’t take more than a minute for Jason to open the door again, and pop his head in the doorway.

He couldn’t help himself, he nodded. Jason gave a sheepish smile.

“You go on over, get your coffee,” said Jess, this time not as bothered. “Later. Talk to you in a while.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.