My first visit to Dublin was in the late 60s. I’ll never forget the squalid conditions and the women wearing shawls over their heads and carrying barefoot, filthy children around. Yikes! It improved over the years. But I couldn’t wait to get out of that city.
It sounds like scenes of the Potato Famine years. I was in Belfast and Londonderry in 1982. It was scary. And my mother’s cousins outside Londonderry didn’t have electricity.