While all around it has changed utterly during the boom years, L Connaughton & Sons Ltd is very much in a traditional industry in the docklands, writes ROSE DOYLE.

THERE ARE parts of Dublin that are forever Dublin, no matter the glass monoliths and shining designs of the newly emerging capital. There are companies that are forever Dublin too, rooted and busy as they've ever been.

You couldn't get a better example of the latter than L Connaughton & Sons Ltd ships' suppliers. Based in Grand Canal Quay, Dublin 2, Connaughton's is integral and more than holding its own in an area which these days is also home to the buzz of Google's HQ, Grand Canal Square and what's being hailed as the hub of the new Dublin.

What a lot of the arrivistes don't know is that this has always been a busy and buzzing corner of the city.

Donal Connaughton knows, and remembers it well. His father, Larry Connaughton, knew it too, which was why he opened a corner shop on Grand Canal Street in 1940.

Donal, an instinctive and convivial storyteller and "elder lemon" of the four Connaughton brothers running today's show, gives the low down on how it was and is.

"My father was born in Longford, one of a family of nine children on a small farm. His father paid to have him apprenticed to a grocer when he left school but he didn't stay at that too long before taking flight to London and a job in the bar business on Great India Road."

Reflecting for a moment, he decides this must have been where his father "met sailors and God knows what" and had his horizons widened before returning to Dublin to open his corner shop on Grand Canal Street on November 1st, 1940.

Commemorating the date, the front page of The Irish Times for November 1st, 1940 hangs framed in the reception area.

"Poverty was huge at the time," Donal says, "there were no supermarkets, just small shops on every street corner and lots of tenements and crowded buildings. There wasn't much competition because each shop built up a nucleus of its own customers and used the book system - people came in, got what they needed, had it written up and paid on Friday. When there was a Holy Communion or death in the family they mightn't be able to pay. They were hard times but most people were up front and paid."

Poor it might have been, like the rest of the city, but Grand Canal Street and environs was "a really busy part of town. You had Paddy Dun's Hospital, CIÉ, the Hammond Lane Foundry, the Gas Company, Boland's Bakery, the Irish Glass Bottle Company.

"There mightn't have been supermarkets but there were fine shops around the city: Findlaters - when you walked in there the smells of spices and whatnot were to die for; Monument Creameries; Liptons; Home & Colonial; Smyth's of the Green."

In 1946, in Westland Row Church, Larry Connaughton married Ita, the Longford woman, nurse and "neighbour's child" he'd already met in London. After opening and then selling a second shop in Sandwith Street, he and Ita bought a house on Bath Avenue in which they lived until 1989 and where they reared their family of two girls and four boys.

The girls didn't go into the business: Ita lives in Wexford, Kit in Ashbourne, Co Meath. Donal and "the lads, Kieran, Padraig and Lawrence, have been in the business all our lives, since we were 17 to 18 anyway".

Donal Connaughton "can't say exactly" when his father "became involved in the ships' suppliers business. The grocery business, as such, started to go to supermarkets in the 1970s and 1980s, and became competitive. Small places started to go to the wall.

"There were about 18 small shops around the Bath Avenue area, everyone was at it. We'd a fire in the Grand Canal Street shop just after Easter 1970 and, when we restored it, we got rid of the old books, etc, and started from scratch. My father went down and rooted around the docks, got to know different ships and companies. In those days ships had to take on stores in every port. Nowadays with refrigeration and all that it's not quite as necessary. Crew numbers aren't so large now either."

He "can't say exactly" when it was his father first began supplying ships, but well remembers their first customer.

"It was a ship called The Mintand belonged to the Dublin Steam Trawler Co on Brittain Quay. We started by supplying food, which is still what we mainly supply, but supply anything else ships wanted too. And I mean anything!" He chortles and recalls a few "anythings".

"A Canary Islands ship once asked my father for a greyhound. That greyhound was in our house on Bath Avenue for 10 days being fed by my poor mother. It was in pristine shape going off to the Canary Islands where it performed so well we got an order for two more and supplied them too. We supplied a couple of Red Setters to the Canary Islands as well. You wouldn't get away with it today."

Lamenting the restricted world we live in brings on a rash of dockland memories.

"The docks used to be very busy. There's more tonnage coming in and out now but it's carried by far fewer vessels. Years ago 10,000 tons of coal from Poland needed 10 ships. Now one ship can bring in 30,000 tons with less crew and less overheads. It used be very labour intensive but the docker population is only a fraction of what it was.

"I remember going down the docks as a young fella and seeing the stevedore on his box calling out the names of the men to be employed for the day. When a coal boat come in from Garston, Merseyside, the dockers would have to dig the coal out, basically. It was really tough work. There were a lot of small coasters then, the odd tanker and lots of cattle boats. Cattle went on the hoof from Dublin during the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s."

The Grand Canal Street shop ceased trading as a shop in 1972-'73 (it's a café/restaurant today).

Connaughtons opened a supply centre in Temple Bar in the mid-1970s but soon moved to a warehouse on the quays, close to the Custom House. In 1978 the company bought next door to where they are now in Grand Canal Quay and, in 1992, extended and moved into the section they're in today.

"It's a fine location for what we do," Donal says, "close to the docks, our stomping ground and second home. We do a lot of business with Dublin Airport, looking after in-flight services for Aer Lingus and all that, but the docks are our bigger customer.

"We look after Irish Ferries, Stena Line, Norfolk Line and P & O Lines as well as regular vessels. Now the summer's coming lots of cruise liners will be coming on visits.

"The Japanese ships are most interesting because they start their world trips in Kobe and Dublin is their last port of call before heading across the Atlantic to the United States."

We take a walk to the Connaughton bonded storehouse, a massive building to the rear stored to its steel rafters and with tightly secured duty-free whiskey, gin, beer, etc. There's a refrigeration area too, and other stores underground. It's a glimpse of another world.