Some time in the years before the Battle of Waterloo a Dublin merchant named Patrick Flynn opened a factory for making starch and blueing at 53 Back Lane, in the parish of St Nicholas-without-the-City-Walls.

    By now Mr Flynn would have faded from all knowledge were it not that his genes contributed in part to the generic make-up of the author of Ulysses; for he was James Joyce's maternal great-grandfather.

    It was from the Flynn family that Joyce was to derive most of the details for his long story 'The Dead', in which he describes these ancestral Dubliners of his under the name Morkan - that name being taken by him from spirits and tea merchants on Arran Quay in the Dublin of his own day...

    Back Lane, formerly Rochelle Street, was in the highest and oldest part of Dublin, where the original Viking settlement of the ninth century had been laid, and around which the medieval English city subsequently spread out...
    City directories of the period show that by 1818 Patrick Flynn was running a spirit store at the Back Lane address. The starch and blueing factory had been removed by Patrick and James Flynn (who I take to be his sons, or a son and brother) to premises at Thomas Street and Francis Street. Later they had other premises in Back Lane at numbers 50 and 51 until 1835. But as one of the Morkan sisters in 'The Dead' points out, the 'ancestral mansion' was elsewhere.
    The city valuation of 1830 shows the Flynns resident at what was later number 16 Ellis Quay on the north side of the Liffey, on the river bank below Stoneybatter.

(From Biography by Peter Costello)