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Fire in the Disco! Raheny Station

Danger danger! High voltage! Such is the message I am greeted with when trying to catch a glimpse of the original Raheny station building. Electric Six aside, a fire has not happened here (to my knowledge) although the barbed fencing suggests the risk of one is not far off. Discos on the other hand, have.
Danger! Front entrance to original Raheny Station

A Georgian two-storey building, the station entrance at street level is interesting in that it drops to the basement at platform level. Rather than placing a single-storey station and having to dig a sloped entrance, passengers could make their way to the train via internal staircases – much cheaper.
Original Raheny Station from platform level
Residential in appearance, its symmetry and gabled central front doorway reveal its function as a station; key features such as these demonstrate the emerging architectural ‘idea of a railway station’. Opened on 25 May 1844 on the original Dublin and Drogheda Railway (to become Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway and then GNRI), a plaque surreptitiously displayed in the left-corner of the current DART metal and glass ticket-barrier shed informs no-one that the station was opened by Lord Lieutenant Earl de Grey and that Irish MP Daniel O’Connell had visited the previous day holding a banquet for over 700 people at nearby Edenmore House.
Plaque at Raheny DART Station
Now St. Joseph's Hospital, the house was previously known as Violet Hill when inhabited by its former resident, Samuel Dick, the Governor of the Bank of Ireland.  Ask About Ireland has a sketch of Edenmore which demonstrated a mix of Palladian Georgian country house architecture with its square-headed windows, symmetry and neo-classical portico. Not a bad place for a railway party.
Edenmore House, formerly Violet Hill
The Earl de Grey of our story was not that of tea-fame (distant cousins apparently, but then they all were, weren’t they) but the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1841 to July 1844, two months after the party. Not that I’m linking the two.

O’Connell on the other hand was a regular railway passenger in England and Ireland, and reportedly in a rage at reading Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, tossed the book out of the railway window declaring “He should not have killed her!”

Railway parties and carriage tantrums aside, the original Raheny station can be seen in action in the 1960s and then partly-boarded with a steam train in 1979, the graffiti revealing its state of closure.

Joe Bell, author of Raheny Memories in 1988 says the station master’s house, lived in by Joe O’Meara, was on the top floor, with the waiting rooms at platform level. Two railway cottages were apparently also existent at the site until their ‘later’ demolition – is it their roofs which can be seen to the left of the station building above the bridge?

Walking along Station Road towards the central crossroads in Raheny Village, the Manhattan Bar stands rather grandly at the corner of the Crescent Cottages (built for Samuel Dick’s Violet Hill estate).
The Manhattan Bar in its present form
The pub’s website lays claim to over 170 years of history starting in 1843 with the opening of the Manhattan Public House by Felix McGowran. This is one year before the grand opening of the railway which began construction in 1840; Felix evidently had an eye for business.


Intermittently called The Station House and then The Cock & Bull, the Manhattan was originally a vernacular Irish Georgian two-storey building, with later frontispieces, such as the wooden gabling, added when it was The Station House.

One can appreciate the attempt at architectural synchronisation with the original station, but it is a tad pastiche.
The former Station House Bar
Standing beside the forlorn Raheny station now encircled by electricity generators, razored fencing and a jungle of overgrowth, the party is well and truly over. Is this fine example of early Irish railway architecture really destined to spend the rest of its days in this manifestation of a hangover?

I think it’s time for an Alka-Seltzer.

Sources:
Ask About Ireland
The Manhattan Bar
Parish of Raheny
Jar.ie
The Carlisle Kid
OoCities.org
Bell, Joe, Raheny Memories, 1988: Raheny Heritage Society

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