Oram The Little Book of Ballsbridge

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5829-5
Verlag: THP Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

The Little Book of Ballsbridge is a compendium of fascinating, obscure, strange and entertaining facts about this leafy suburb of Dublin. Here you will find out about Ballsbridge's famous (and occasionally infamous) residents, its proud sporting heritage, its churches and great houses and its natural history. Down wide streets and past elegant houses, this book takes the reader on a journey through Ballsbridge and its vibrant past. A reliable reference book and a quirky guide, this can be dipped into time and time again to reveal something new about the people, the heritage and the secrets of Dublin's 'embassy belt'.

Hugh Oram is an author, broadcaster and journalist with countless articles and books to his name, who has lived and worked in Dublin for many years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oram, Hugh

Leseproben

2

FAMOUS RESIDENTS

AILESBURY ROAD

Sir Alfred Chester Beatty was an Irish-American mining magnate and millionaire, often called the ‘King of Copper’. He became a naturalised British subject in 1933. He was also an avid collector of art and books from Asia and the Middle East. In 1949, he decided to leave Britain for tax reasons and settled in Dublin, buying a twelve-room house on Ailesbury Road for IR£12,000. He moved in in May 1950, along with 35 tons of artworks.

He then bought No. 20 Shrewsbury Road and had the Chester Beatty Library and Gallery built there. It opened in 1953 and when the extension was opened in 1957, it was attended by the then President, Sean T. O’Kelly and the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera. The library and gallery were relocated to Dublin Castle in 2000 and subsequent attempts to redevelop the site in Shrewsbury Road have been unsuccessful. After Sir Alfred died while in Monaco in 1968, he was accorded a State funeral, one of the few occasions on which a private Irish citizen has been given such an honour.

Kevin Haugh (1891–1969) was a barrister and judge; he was Attorney General from 1940 to 1942, when he became a Supreme Court judge, a position he held until retirement in 1968 and lived on Ailesbury Road. His son, also Kevin (1944–2009), followed his father’s path to the Bar and the High Court; he was also a circuit court judge. He was a popular and well-liked judge; subsequently, he became chairman of the Garda Ombudsman Commission, dealing with complaints against the force and its members, which began in 2007. One of the children from the marriage of Kevin Haugh and his wife Annette is their son Bob Haugh, who owns a well-known Dublin travel agency, The Travel Department.

J.P. McManus, a billionaire magnate with interests that include horse racing and soccer, lives permanently in Switzerland, but he has a Dublin residence.

The original house dated back to Edwardian times and became the Japanese embassy in 1970. The embassy was moved to offices beside the Merrion Centre in 1992; eventually the house was bought by Bernard McNamara, a property developer, for IR£2.95 million – a record for the road at that time.

McNamara demolished the house and built a new one on a lavish scale. In 2011 the house was sold for €10 million to J.P. McManus. He and his wife also have two mews houses at the rear, where they built an orangery in the garden of one of them.

ANGLESEA ROAD

Brendan Behan, the writer, lived all his married life at No. 5 Anglesea Road, close to the bridge at Ballsbridge. His wife was Beatrice, daughter of the painter, playwright, poet and publisher Cecil Salkeld. Behan died in 1964 but Beatrice continued to live in the house. After Behan’s death, Beatrice lived with Cathal Goulding, chief of staff of the Official IRA, until 1972. Their son was Paudge. The house at No. 5 had been bought by Behan in 1961 for IR£1,600, but in 2006 Paudge reluctantly sold it.

John Byrne, a noted property developer and great friend of former Taoiseach the late Charles Haughey, lived just off Anglesea Road for many years. He was 94 years old when he died in October 2013. One of Ireland’s wealthiest property developers, he was responsible for the construction of such modern architectural monstrosities as O’Connell Bridge House in central Dublin.

Neil Campbell-Sharpe, a noted photographer, lived at No. 2 Anglesea Road in the mid-1970s. He was married to Noelle Campbell-Sharpe, the one-time magazine publisher and subsequent art gallery owner, and the woman behind the Kilreilig creative arts centre in west Kerry.

Clara Dumbleton, who is in her late 80s, is one of the few residents of the area who was born in and lived in the same house all her life. Her late father, Harry, was the manager of the tar depot on Hanover Quay that belonged to the old Dublin Gas Company.

Denis O’Brien, one of Ireland’s, indeed the world’s, wealthiest entrepreneurs was brought up in Ballsbridge. He has extensive media interests that include radio stations in Europe and a major stake in Independent News & Media, as well as being the man behind Digicel, a world leader in mobile telephony. Before going to University College Dublin (UCD), he had started his first job at 14, at the Central Hotel in Exchequer Street in central Dublin.

Born in Cork in 1958, he is the second of four children of Denis O’Brien senior and his wife Iris. The family home was in Anglesea Road, and his parents still live in the same house there. In 2013, O’Brien was ranked by Forbes as having a net worth of around €4 billion.

BALLSBRIDGE TERRACE

Gerry Downey, a well-known men’s hairdresser whose salon is in the Ballsbridge Hotel, the former Jurys Hotel, was born in Ballsbridge Terrace during the Second World War. The house he was born and brought up in is now Kite’s Chinese restaurant. On occasion, he has dined in the upstairs room at Kite’s that was once his bedroom. A next-door neighbour on the terrace, a member of the Presbyterian Hamill family, was an Orangeman who went north every 12 July, but when he had become too old to travel, he used to wear his Orange regalia and march around his back garden, beating his drum and playing his instruments on the big day.

BURLINGTON ROAD

Professor George O’Brien of UCD, one of Ireland’s leading economists, lived in this road for many years. His dinner parties were legendary. He was wealthy enough to employ several servants at his home and he dined out frequently in Dublin.

He had an intense dislike of travel, so if any international economists wanted to meet him, they had to travel to Dublin. He was professor of economics at UCD from 1926 until 1961. In the mid-1960s, he was one of the most vociferous critics of the ESB’s decision to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Lower Fitzwilliam Street to make room for their new headquarters. In his later years, he had a very fixed routine, reading the Irish morning papers at home before going to Mass in St Mary’s, then collecting the English newspapers at Parsons on Baggot Street Bridge. In February 1973, on his way home from Mass, he collapsed in the street from a heart attack. He spent all that summer in Baggot Street Hospital and died on 4 January 1974.

Mary Henry, who lives at No. 12, hails from Blackrock, County Cork, where she was born in 1940. The first non-foundation scholar in medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1962, she subsequently became a medical practitioner as well as a professor and she represented Trinity College graduates in the Seanad from 1993 to 2007. Her many other interests include working with Cherish, the Irish Penal Reform Trust, the Rape Crisis Centre and the Well Woman centre. She married John McEntaggart, a Dublin merchant, in 1966. Meriel, one of their three children, became a medical practitioner.

Gemma Hussey, once a Fine Gael stalwart, who was Minister for Education from 1982 to 1986, but who retired from politics in 1989, lives in Burlington Road with her husband, Derry Power. They had previously lived in Temple Road, Dartry.

Johnny Ronan, one of the most flamboyant property developers in the Celtic Tiger era, teamed up with Richard Barrett in 1989 to form Treasury Holdings, a global property development powerhouse. Ronan built a spectacular mansion in Burlington Road, nicknamed the ‘Pink Palazzo’. It is now the residence of the ambassador of Qatar, whose equally spectacular embassy is in Pembroke Road.

CLYDE ROAD

Dick Spring, a former leader of the Labour Party and a former Tanaiste, now retired from politics and a director of the Fexco financial services group, was a student at Trinity College in the late 1960s, early 1970s. At one stage, he had a bedsit in Raglan Road, before sharing a flat on Clyde Road with two young women (all innocent on his part, he says) until the morality squad in the shape of the owners of the house objected and he had to move out. He also lived in the top flat of Mrs Hartigan’s house at No. 12 Herbert Park for some years, before he took over a big flat in Raglan Road after his brother Donal had moved out. Since 1994, Dick Spring has kept an apartment at Beggar’s Bush.

ELGIN ROAD

Robert ‘Bobby’ Ballagh, one of Ireland’s most distinguished contemporary artists, lived as a child in the basement flat of No. 14; his father worked in the wholesale drapery firm of Ferrier Pollock, in South William Street, occupying what is now the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre. Bobby’s godparents lived nearby, in Lansdowne Road, and he recalls that the Ballsbridge of the 1950s was very different to today. Elgin Road was so quiet that he and friends played tennis in the road, stretching the net across the road. From beginning to end of a game, no cars appeared!

He also recalls that in those days, the neighbourhood was very mixed. In those days, he adds, Ballsbridge wasn’t posh at all, contrary to popular belief. He left Elgin Road in the early 1960s and lost track of many of the people he knew there.

Gay Byrne, the television presenter who hosted the Late Late Show on RTÉ until 1999, began his broadcasting career with the station in the early 1960s – the Late Late Show had started as a temporary summer filler in 1964. That year, he married Kathleen Watkins, the daughter of a vet, and their first home was a flat in Elgin Road.

Kevin Kelly and his wife Rose live in Elgin Road. He was a high-profile publisher, responsible for developing such magazines as Image.

Delia Murphy, the noted West of Ireland singer, and her husband, Tom Kiernan, came to live in this road in 1935....