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Our Dublin Photo Diary series continues with the remaining eight portraits of photographer Shay Hunston’s People Of Temple Bar project. Earlier this year, I began a project to photograph and document, street by street, the independent retailers in Temple Bar, one of the oldest parts of Dublin. As each street was completed an exhibition of the photographs was staged in the shop windows. A collage of the photographs was also displayed on each street. The project helps to create a greater awareness and promote the businesses and streets in the area. I started the project at the quieter, Christ Church end of Temple Bar, many of these cobbled and terraced streets such as

As part of our ongoing Dublin Photo Diary series, we showcase the best of Dublin based Photographers. This week we feature the work of Aidan Kelly. Having worked for such clients such as Mercury Prize nominee Gemma Hayes, Gavin Friday, Ruby works records, Brown Thomas, Jameson Irish Whiskey, U2, Sony, Rodrigo y Gabriella, Choice Cuts music with Candi Staton, Axis Ballymun for the Irish Arts Council, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Channel 4 UK with renowned playwright Martin MacDonagh, Oscar winning Fantastic Films, Ireland and many others, Aidan has certainly built a formidable reputation in the industry.

Being in The Dubliners always made you feel like a bit of an ambassador for the city. I mean we were all instantly recognisable, and I think people felt at one with us. There’s a nice feeling of unity about being a Dub. And Dubliners in general never made any great fuss of their own sons and daughters who became well known (laughs). When The Dubliners celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2012, I had been with the band for 48 of those 50 years. I served an apprenticeship as an electrician in the ESB, and worked there as a draftsman for a few years. But the music was always a hobby, and at a certain point I had to give it up and join the lads. It was precarious in the early days, but there was always a great sense of adventure about the whole thing. We were doing it for the craic as much as anything else, and gradually it became a living. I think anybody who can extend their hobby to the extent that it becomes their livelihood, that’s a real privilege. Especially anyone who’s making music.

I’m from Clondalkin, and I’ve recently set up a support group for people who are bereaved by suicide, having lost my own son Daniel to suicide in 2014. It’s been running for a couple of months now. There are no support groups out there specifically for parents, so I set up my own one. We have eight people in the group, and we meet up every two weeks locally, in a house connected to St Ronan’s Church

For the first in our Dublin Photo Diary series, we asked photographer Shay Hunston to talk about his People Of Temple Bar project. We’ve featured eight portraits in Part 1 with the remaining eight to be featured next week: Earlier this year, I began a project to photograph and document, street by street, the independent retailers in Temple Bar, one of the oldest parts of Dublin. As each street was completed an exhibition of the photographs was staged in the shop windows.

In my dream, the Blessington Street Basin fills with the Liffey’s stout-­bottle waters, but still the swimmers come, in droves, on the stray sovereign of an Irish summer’s day. The river courses through the city, turning concrete roadways to canal banks that shrug their shoulders into dark water; a man rises, seal­-like, in his caul of silt, to wave. At the sluice gate, where the river bends out of sight between toppling buildings, a black dog jumps, again and again, into the water. And there, at the edge of vision, my parents, ready to join the swimmers, gesture their cheerful farewells.

Whatever a CV says, we are born in rooms and grow up in houses. Cities come later, long after streets and shops and villages and churches and a signal box at the level-crossing on Sydney Parade where an elderly man with enormous ears, who is almost deaf from fifty years spent switching points on the coastal track, gives you a Victorian penny to insert in the slot of a thing never seen before in the whole wide world: a vending machine that sells British bubblegum called Zapper to twelve year-old schoolboys who wear short grey trousers in mid-February.

Why do any of us choose what part of the city we live in? Budget usually dictates, as well as practicalities – Is it near a Luas stop? What are the local schools like? – or sometimes, well, it’s just for random reasons. Occasionally, we’ll get a yen to live somewhere in particular, because we’ve decided we like its village vibe. When I moved to Harold’s Cross six years ago, my motivation was less notional and more prosaic. We’re talking about a room in a very nice house, with people I liked and most importantly of all, it was only twenty minutes’ walk into Dublin’s city centre.

For the love of spice bags... In Dublin pubs, the conversation has now evolved from queries of ‘What is a spice bag?’ and ‘Have you had a spice bag yet?’ to more pressing issues of etiquette and availability. Because everyone’s mother probably now knows what a spice bag is, that celebrated, moreish takeaway meal combo of chicken, chips and spices in a bag (foil or paper) and the occasional bit of onion and red pepper thrown in. She may have even eaten one. Once seen as something only millennials should let past their lips, it’s now gone properly mainstream, and was voted Ireland’s favourite dish at the Just Eat National Takeaway Awards last year. A mere culinary craze? We don’t think so.

Some weeks ago, I was leading a group of World Heritage masters students on a tour of the north city which began in St Mary’s Abbey Chapter House and finished in Mountjoy Square. At the end of the day we were invited in to view one of the houses on the square, and I found myself back in a ground floor apartment that I had first encountered decades earlier. At the age of nine, I was brought to visit my uncle who was living in a flat at the corner of Mountjoy Square and Grenville Street. I remember a vast bright interior with a beautiful bow window, and a raised sleeping mezzanine over the kitchen.

I didn’t get to Dublin until I was five but I embraced it, pronto. Either that, or the force of impact turned my California twang into a Dublin one, and my blonde hair mousey within a week. Aiming to please, and blend in, at all costs became a survival strategy for growing up in the Liberties, where intimate, narrow streets hosted hops heavy breezes from the Guinness brewery. There, they

I’m a burlesque performer, bellydancer, producer, stylist and maker. I make a lot of my costumes from scratch; you might take an item, say a pair of shoes, and completely reimagine them. My sitting room is my studio, so half the time everything’s covered in sequens and glitter. I describe Dublin as a little powerful nugget of genius; there been an incredible influx of people from so many different cultures, we’re able to take those influences and put our own spin on it. It’s very important, especially in this centenary year, that people get out and engage with everything Dublin has to offer. There’s art, music, theatre, comedy, and it’s all very accessible. That’s the brilliant thing with the burlesque scene here, there’s such a diverse pool of performers from all walks of life. I’m very much about cross-pollination.