Crammed full of religious curios, Eamonn Murphy’s little shop is one of the most distinctive on O’Connell Street
On the northern edge of O’Connell Street there’s a small narrow shop with a red-and-white sign that reads “Mary Mediatrix of All Graces”.
Outside the shop a blackboard says “A single instant in my will is worth an entire lifetime doing good works”.
It’s what Jesus Christ said to the mystic Luisa Piccarreta, a woman who survived on only Communion wafers for several decades, according to the shop’s proprietor, Eamonn Murphy.
The shop feels old but it has only been there for six years. Its window sometimes features signs for contemporary anti-abortion campaigns, although there are none today.
Inside it’s filled with holy medals, statues and rosary beads, CDs with titles like How to Keep the Kids Catholic, statuettes of various incarnations of the Virgin Mary, religious paintings and shelves full of books and pamphlets, many dedicated to the Divine Will, a theological concept with which Murphy has become fascinated over the past year.
“Have you heard about the Divine Will?” he says to a man from Northern Ireland who has been browsing, before telling him about Luisa Piccarreta and her revelation that we could live in the single will of the three persons of the Trinity.
“The Divine Will is something I only heard about in the late nineties,” Murphy tells me. “It went in one ear and out the other at the time but then someone left in some books and I read them when I was tidying up. The light went on and I realised that this was true.”
Spiritual guidance
Murphy, a softly spoken man with a trimmed grey beard, previously ran a tourist office in the same location. He once told people where to go physically and now he tells them where to go spiritually. He laughs at the idea.
He’s actually been an evangelist for a long time. In the early 1980s he went to Russia with the legion of Mary.
“Brezhnev was the leader,” he says. “We were followed by the KGB. They knew we were coming. It was a regular trip. It was quite restrictive but the people were hungry. They weren’t allowed read the Bible. Their churches were turned into museums. There was a hunger for the truth and they were extremely open and very friendly.
“Nobody was dismissive or antagonistic or even really critical. We’d go around the parks and streets and offer people a miraculous medal and tell them we were Christians from Ireland, where everyone was a believer. That was true about Ireland at that time. We’d say to them in Russian: ‘God exists’.”
Labour of love
The shop is a labour of love. “It’s really an apostolate,” he says. “A friend of mine has a bookshop like this in Cork and I thought it would be an opportunity to have one here on O’Connell Street. It’s an opportunity to evangelise, not just to people here in Ireland but also to people who come to the Bord Fáilte tourist office a couple of doors up. You have a global reach here. But you also meet people coming in with a lot of different problems and you can offer them hope.”
He subsidises his income by photocopying for people coming from the nearby Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Up until last year he also ran a bureau de change at the back of the store, but it wasn’t very profitable so he stopped. People still come in looking for it. “Are you looking for the foreign exchange?” he asks one man who wanders in.
There’s not much money in religious paraphernalia either, although holy medals, statues and rosary beads sell better than the books. Some of his customers surprise him.
“You know who bought statues of the Virgin Mary recently?” he asks, before answering with arched eyebrows. “Some Lutherans!”
He suggests that the shop may not be there for much longer. “Everything has its time,” he says stoically.
As we chat a young man wanders in seemingly just to show the shop to a female friend. “Isn’t it fascinating!” he whispers. Eamonn Murphy doesn’t seem to mind.
