About Éamon Trolleybus

Éamon Trolleybus was born in the heart of Dublin in 1897. The youngest child of a freelance milk-maid and an itinerant Parisienne glamour photographer who struggled to make ends meet in spite of an almost total lack of inner urban cattle or topless photographic models at that time. In fact, young Éamon and his seventeen siblings nearly starved to death on a daily basis for five years before their parents hit upon the idea of charging the indolent ruling classes a farthing a time to watch the Trolleybus children waste away.

Show business history was about to be written - the Trolleybus kids, or The Fabulous Starving Plebeian Children of Dublin as they were billed, travelled the known world and were malnourished in front of the crowned Heads of Europe and three US Presidents.

“We were bigger than the Beatles, only much thinner and far less musical” recalls Éamon today: “Also, unlike the Beatles nine of us died of starvation on the road between 1907 and the outbreak of the Great War”.

As the act grew smaller in number and food became more plentiful for the survivors, the fans became disillusioned with the sight of nine obviously healthy and well-fed children trying to pass themselves off as starving, and so, in April of 1915, The Fabulous Starving Plebeian Children of Dublin performed their last concert to a capacity crowd in the Theatre Royal Dublin. Within two months, Eamon’s father passed away, a victim of over-eating. Mrs Trolleybus changed her name to Helga Omnikar and went to work for the Prussian Navy never to be seen again. Éamon for his part pursued a solo starving career but the success that he enjoyed as part of a family act evaded him and soon he was penniless and starving on the street. “Nothing could have prepared me for that blow” he remembers today, “Nothing”.

From 1916 to 1979, Éamon was a familiar sight peeping in through windows and as a result occasionally out through the bars of a cell. In 1980 fate dealt him a new hand as a whole new industry was formed - talking utter nonsense about how much better things were in the old days. European Community grants for talking bollix made Éamon Trolleybus a rich man. Fame beckoned when he became a household name with his regular “How To Talk To People” slots on radio and through live lecture appearances and walking tours of his beloved Dublin. Then, in 1994, with no explanation, he dropped out of the public eye.

Until, that is, now…

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