“I was eighteen and my then girlfriend, Clare Byrne, was seventeen. We had been going out together since 1971 and eventually married in 1980. At that time, I lived on the High Road, Kilmainham and Clare lived in Islandbridge, so we spent lots of our weekend evenings going to the pictures in the city centre. We came across Arthur quite often. My abiding memory is of him wearing a couple of coats – presumably to keep warm – and his fedora-type hat, with his camera around his neck, doing his best to get to the throngs of people passing him. Some were oblivious to his always polite request to stop for a picture; some did stop, but mostly he would just click and hand you his card as you hurried past on your merry way. They were happy, carefree days in the 1970s, and remembering the Man on the Bridge brings those times flooding back – I suppose that’s also his legacy.”
(1974)
Submitted by Stephen Kelly