THIS is a marvellous heart warming and informative book. And only heart warming. Perhaps a better title or a sub title, could have been Pream san Ol. The memories it evokes in 80 living photographs, and in almost 300 pages of exact and living text are, to me, overpowering.

But then, I'm old enough to remember the men, the places, the gatherings, the quite admirable social customs. Recently I went into a bar in the Ballsbridge area - to make a telephone call and in the course of the struggle asked she lady behind the bar if she had any single shillings. The young men leaning on the counter looked at me curiously. So I asked the way to Nelson's Pillar, and fled.

Shades of Nelson and Louis MacNeice, who honoured me with his friendship, as did many of the gentlemen and ladies mentioned in this great work of genuine research.

The researcher is an American scholar from away out there in Colorado. But the Colorado trail has repeatedly led him to Dublin, about which he has already written fine books, concerning many matters, such as Dublin tenement life, the story of Stoneybatter, et cetera. He is a master at uncovering and revealing and explaining the past.

I am again a young newspaper man and feel the honour of being led into the Palace Bar and introduced by M.J. MacManus to his fellow Sligoman, P.M. Smyllie. You could not go higher than that. And the old joke was that M.J. and R.M. had first encountered each other when they were playing the fiddle in a competition at the Sligo Feis.

But if you were in the company of those two great men, you inevitably met everybody. And found your way to every congenial pub meeting place. Not that they wandered here and there, but they were at the centre of a talkative, convivial and learnedly interesting society.

There was the notable day when R.M., because of some imagined slight in the Palace, walked out, glass in hand, to the Pearl, accompanied by the group, including myself, who had been sitting with him, all with glasses, like chalices, in hand. It was a harmless row, though, and easily settled.

This book echoes, genuinely echoes with memorable names. Some of the owners of those names made a lot of sound, not noise. The sound always meant something.

Inevitably you would have to begin the list with dear Brendan, and Patrick the poet, who was a gentler man than most people thought. Then there were older and more silent men - say Austin Clarke, to whom one looked up with reverence. And Myles. And many, many more. They are all here.

But the book is not by any means just a wonderful list of wonderful people who flourished in a period that has just slipped away from us. As I read I heard again the voice of my dear friend, Margaret Barry, and the violin music of her partner, Michael Gorman, a Sligoman from a part of Sligo with which, because of relatives of mine, I was familiar a.from an early age.

There is more, much more. For Kevin C. Kearns, this industrious scholar from Colorado, has filled most informative pages by interviewing publicans, barmen, pub regulars and general observers. Dublin is talking here, all Ireland is talking, as if it were, free and easy, in the confessional. Open this great book, sneak in, and listen.

On the very first page Liam Blake is quoted, from his Irish Pubs (1958), as saying: "In its influence on public opinion, the pint has been as powerful a catalyst as the pulpit, and the pub is as worthy of serious discussion and consideration as the Church."

There are a few growls from here and there, from good people who don't like alcoholic drink and who worry about the people who do, and about what drink can do to them. They have their point and they are entitled to their opinion.