Greg Sheaf is a librarian at Trinity College, but when he arrived in Dublin from the UK 20 years ago he didn’t have much of a plan.
By chance, while looking for work, he saw an advert for trainee librarians and ended up spending a year at the Allen Library on North Richmond Street.
“It was fantastic,” he recalls. “I discovered that you can become a professional librarian. I went to UCD to do a higher diploma there, then started working in a hospital library, then came here to Trinity.”
Trinity Library contains around six-and-a-half million volumes, but although Greg says people imagine him sitting around and leafing through books all day, most of his time is taken up helping people with enquiries – mainly students: “I deal more with people than I do with books.”
He gets most satisfaction from training people how to navigate the masses of information available to them at the library, both on the shelves and electronically.
“Librarianship is more teaching a man to fish rather than giving a man a fish,” says Greg. “It is very rewarding, seeing the look on someone's face when they work out how to find something themselves.”
Greg says he has seen a lot of changes in the city in his two decades here. “When I first got off that Ryanair flight 20 years ago, the Celtic Tiger was just about to ramp up,” he recalls.
“I remember getting my first mobile phone and then seeing how every other shop became a mobile phone shop – the same way that last year we went through the donut craze and now every other shop is a vape shop.
“Seeing the different ethnicities is quite interesting, how Parnell Street has become a little Chinatown in my time here. And how Dublin has evolved and changed.”
It’s not all good – Greg has seen big department stores like Roches Stores and Clery’s close, and he says he would like the city to be a bit cleaner and safer. Though, he says, “I live in Finglas so I'm used to seeing cop cars haring down the street occasionally.”
After two decades Greg has made his career here, and he’s settled in his personal life too. Now he sees himself in Dublin for good. “This is where I consider myself to be from now,” he says.
“My wife is Irish, I've been here for 20 years and I don't really see myself going back to the UK, especially with how things are going now. The next decision I need to make is whether I want to pay the thousand euro to get the citizenship.
“I actually have all the paperwork, it's just the thought of paying the thousand euro to go through with it. But friends of mine have done it and I daresay at some stage I will do that.”
In the meantime, he’ll carry on doing his job – helping people to find their way through the library’s vast resources and making sure that truth, facts and evidence always win out over misinformation and ‘fake news’.
“People have always believed what they wanted to believe,” says Greg. “The only way to fight against that is to make sure that you engage with people and try and change their mind by showing them the evidence.
“That's why we need good librarians and good libraries.”
