Her current beat is the business section, where regulars come for the morning papers. We get a lot of homeless people in – they might be out of their hostels early, so they can come in from 10am when we open - Librarian Eimear Corcoran They range from local Dublin 1 and north inner city residents to members of community groups, students, business people and day trippers. Since Christmas, the library has had about 700 visitors a day. It has 10,000 registered borrowers, including 5,430 new ones in 2022. The Central Library had about 90,000 visitors last year. This meet-up for the Chinese community, facilitated by the Early Learning Initiative, is now so popular there is another session on Fridays. In the afternoon, it’s a Mandarin storytelling play group. It’s a solid crew of 30 regulars and their adults who hang out afterwards for a chat. I usually describe it as a rave, it’s buzzing down there,” she says of the library’s junior section.Įimear Corcoran, acting librarian at the Central Library, Ilac, Dublin.įrom 10.30am, you’ll find a jam of buggies arriving for toddler storytime with music. Last year, we borrowed 10,756,742 items – that’s everything from a book to a bassoon or bass guitar (you can borrow an amp for that too).
More than 800,000 of us are library members. Fines on overdue books for one: they were abolished in 2019 – which is probably just as well for the person who returned The White Owl by Annie MP Smithson to Gweedore library that year, 83 years after it had been checked out. If you haven’t visited your local library since you lost their copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1982, things have changed. You’ll find books, information, wifi, a place to study and to work, and also a place to meet, to learn and to play. From Buncrana to Bandon, Inisbofin to Inchicore, there is a place to go and to be where you don’t have to spend a thing. You’ll find them lounging in armchairs with a copy of the New Yorker, convening for a foreign language film club, listening to David Bowie, or maybe even borrowing a book. They say members’ clubs are dead, but there remains one with undeniable perks.
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