For more than 50 years, the bright yellow shopping bags from Gerry Keane Wallpapers have been a familiar sight throughout Dublin city.
Generations of the capital’s residents have decorated their homes with products sold by Gerry Keane and his sons, but now the city’s last wallpaper store is preparing to close down after Christmas.
“People have come into the shop telling us we cannot close,” says Eamon Keane of the business his father started.
When the family announced its closing down sale in recent weeks, an outpouring of nostalgia-tinged sadness followed.
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“We’ve had people almost fighting with the girls downstairs and saying ‘You can’t close! We are four generations coming here. I’ve been here with my mammy and my granny, and this is my daughter’.”
Eamon and his two brothers, Derek and Alan, are co-owners and have run the business together since their father died in 2018. Each of them has taken the reins of a different part of the business.
Nothing is forcing the family out, he says. The siblings and their “genuinely irreplaceable” long-serving staff are now reaching retirement age together, bringing the company to a natural conclusion.
“It is sad that the business ever has to end, but we have no way of passing it on. [The staff] downstairs have been serving the same people for 50 years. They are the company, you cannot just pull them out and replace them.”
Other shops in the area have come and gone, but the business managed to survive.
“Years ago, even Talbot Street had seven wallpaper shops, would you believe it. There would have been more than 20 wallpaper shops in the city centre, but we are the last one surviving.
“In those days, they wallpapered every wall in every house. Houses back then came with a wallpaper allowance,” he said.
“People came in and spent their allowance from the builder to paper the entire house, so it was a lucrative business.”
The company expanded across the city, with as many as five stores at its peak, but consolidated to having the Talbot Street store as well as an outlet store in John F Kennedy Park in Bluebell just before the turn of the millennium.
Throughout, the sector has been strong, largely insulated by the economic downturns which hit the Irish economy during their 53 years. Eamon credits this to the fact that, when people are stuck in their homes during recessionary times, changing the wallpaper is a cheap way to alter their scenery.
Crucial to this stability was also “the incredible loyalty of our customers”. This, Eamon says, was down to his father’s “old-school” way of doing business.
“He was honourable. He had a saying when he was doing a deal, ‘You always leave something in it for the next fellow’.
“Business can be a bit cut throat these days,” Eamon says, but by sticking to their father’s ethos, “our name and his name has never been tarnished”.
Like the walls in people’s homes, everything around the store has changed, too. In 1974, less than two years after the family took up the lease, Talbot Street was rocked by the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
A regular Friday morning, staff in the shop got a fright when the metal rear door of the shop slammed close, when the car bomb on Parnell Street went off.
Less than two minutes later, a further the bomb went off on Talbot Street. The explosions blew out “every single piece of glass in the front of the building”, Eamon says.
One of the founding staff members, who had been brought to the shop by Gerry Keane and still works in the store to this day, had been standing in the window and was blown across the shop by the explosion. Thankfully, he only suffered minor injuries, and the shop got off lightly as 14 people were killed in the bombing.
“It was a shock to everybody,” Eamon says, but the families of Talbot Street and its locally owned stores came together in the aftermath.
“Everyone jumped in and helped each other on the street.”
The hardship formed a neighbourhood that the Keane family felt part of. “We’ve had the greatest characters coming in through the doors here, such as the ladies from Moore Street. The traders, they would be coming through with their families. This is real old Dublin, with all of the old characters of Dublin.”
However, the street the Keane’s leave behind today is very different, as families moved out of the city and small shops were swallowed up by multiples.
The future for the building is now uncertain. There has been great interest in the building, and a deal for the property is nearing agreement.
For now, Gerry Keane Wallpaper remains open and selling off its stock in closing down sales on Talbot Street and at its outlet store, while the family prepares for their “perfect ending”.
“There are so many sad stories about companies going by the wayside, but we are going to step out of our company and pay everyone what they are due. We will wrap it up nicely, and be able to shake hands with everyone we have dealt with.
“We leave a great reputation behind. We leave a great relationship with the funniest people in Dublin, the grannies and the mammies in the city. We leave the nicest working environment, one in which you go in and just chat and have fun every day for 53 years.”
