costumes that looked like cheese wires.
6. Killiney & Dalkey
Welcome to Bel-Éire! The crème de la brulée of the legal, business, music and movie worlds have been buying up this little coastal corner of South Dublin since the mid 1990s. In fact, there is no better metaphor for the Celtic Tiger era than the spectacle of tribunal-rich lawyers and dot.com millionaires engaged in a battle royal with the stars of stage and screen for the Mock-Gothic mansions with the best views of the sea…
Sorrento Terrace, the most sought-after address
in Ireland. If you fancy being Neil Jordan's neighbour,
you better have money. They look down on oil
barons in this part of the world.
Killiney and Dalkey lie on an elevated plane some 100 metres above sea level, and people in the surrounding environs look up and dream of one day living there. And it's little wonder. This is, quite simply, the most beautiful place on Earth.
Killiney Hill Park, with its stunning views of Dublin Bay, Bray Head and the Sugar Loaf, was opened in 1887 to honour Queen Victoria's fifty years on the throne, though the older, more settled residents here see themselves not so much as West Brits than as West Neapolitans. Killiney Bay was once famously likened to the Bay of Naples. Though no one can actually
One of Dalkey's few remaining working-class families get ready to leave, after selling their two-bedroom kennel to a chinless IT millionaire for a record 2.8m euros in 2006.
remember who said it, the locals completely lost the run of themselves and began renaming all the roads in the area in a distinctively Italian vein – Sorrento, Monte Alverno, San Elmo, Vico and Capri.
Killiney has little or no village to speak of, though Dalkey more than makes up for it with its world-famous pubs, gourmet restaurants and shops selling everything from bespoke bedrooms to bespoke kitchens. Near by, Dalkey Island and Bulloch and Coliemore harbours are just two of the other reasons why houses in the area are so sought-after. Today, 1930s council-built slum dwellings that look like sets from Angela's Ashes are changing hands for upwards of €1.5 million.
Killiney and Dalkey are home to a huge population of privileged teens, high-fiving rugby jocks and some of the thinnest girls alive outside of the Third World.
History
There is some disputed evidence of an ancient Celtic civilization in the area. Close to the ruined church on Marino Avenue in Killiney lies what many believe to be a genuine Druid's Chair, though a number of historians have said it's as fake as the area's Mock-Gothic and Mock-Tudor houses that are changing hands for small fortunes.
In 1831 a stone coffin containing a perfectly preserved skeleton was dug up in a field called Quatre Bras, near Killiney. Also in the coffin was a small fortune in ancient Saxon and Danish coins, suggesting that even in the ninth and tenth centuries the people in this part of the city were rolling in it. The name ‘Killiney’ is in fact derived from the Gaelic Cill (village), Ineíon (indecently) and Leínín (loaded).
Dalkey is a Norman town. Its main street is dominated by the Goat and Archbold's castles, where English and French traders stored their wares from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries to protect them from the pillaging O’Byrnes and O'tooles – the forebears of today's skangers. The same tradition is maintained to this day. Dalkey and Killiney people are forced to fortify their homes with reinforced steel windows and alarms to stop the latter-day O’Byrnes and O'tooles from travelling out on the Dart to burgle them blind.
In 1742, after a bout of severe frost, local philanthropist John Mapas offered to make money available for the relief of the poor. He insisted they work for their money, however, and commissioned what stands today as one of South Dublin's most famous landmarks – the obelisk atop Killiney Hill. Mapas's efforts to alleviate desperate poverty by getting people to build something absolutely pointless for a few bob is regarded as Ireland's first ever FÁS course.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the main shipping port in South Dublin was moved from Dalkey to Ringsend, and the area experienced a slump, from which it took almost three centuries to recover. Extensive quarrying for rock to build Dún Laoghaire Harbour, as well as the arrival of the railway in 1843, marked the start of a period of prosperity for Dalkey, which economists predict will never end. Wealthy home-buyers and property investors have bought up most of the poor people's homes, and it is estimated that by 2010 working-class people will have been completely eradicated from Dalkey.
South Dublin's Hollywood Hills
All Northsiders, naturally, want to live on the Southside. Tragically for them, the vast majority never will. However, some Northsiders who have done well out of life have managed to escape the horrors of North Dublin for a better life on the other side of the city.
Bono, the lead singer with U2, grew up in Ballymun, but bought a mansion on the slopes of Killiney Hill once he hit the big time. When he paid what now seems a ridiculously modest one million punts for his Vico Road pile in 1990, he became the first resident of South Dublin's very own Hollywood Hills.
Within ten years some of the biggest names in showbusiness were stumping up eight-figure fortunes for their very own turreted mansion overlooking the bay. Nowadays, whenever a house changes hands at a private auction, there's wild speculation about who the newest resident will be. Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas and Brad Pitt all have coveted homes in the area. Van Morrison, rock's crankiest man, lives here, as does The Edge. Every day, hundreds of busloads of tourists visit this once sedate, leafy paradise to snatch a glimpse of a famous celebrity, or just to see how the rich and famous live.
Quite a number of musical relics of the 1980s have washed up here, including Lisa Stansfield, Jim Kerr, Joe Elliott and Chris de Burgh.
Movie director Jim Sheridan owns a pad on Coliemore Road in Dalkey, while Neil Jordan loved his house on Sorrento Terrace so much that he bought a
Ayesha Castle, a turreted, six-bedroom pile on
Victoria Road, is the home of Enya, who popularized
elevator music and who remains the most recognizable
symbol of Ireland… in northern Japan.
second one. And at €7 million a go, who could blame him?
In the late 1990s Killiney became the place to live for racing-car drivers. Damon Hill, David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine all bought pads there. Irvine remains something of a role model to the area's well-heeled youth, having bedded a succession of stunning women and spent most of his twenties driving a Ferrari round and round in circles, which is what many of Killiney and Dalkey's twenty-somethings spend their summer Sunday afternoons doing.
A WORD FROM JP
I sold a few houses in this area when I was working for my old man. Never sold one in Killifornia – as we used to call Killiney Hill – but I admit I used to dream about being asked to, then retiring on the commission. I was like everyone else in those days – all about money. I did quite a few things I can't say I'm proud of. When Enya paid IR£2.5 million for her place, well, suddenly Killiney was the place to live, and pretty soon we were flogging poky little semis there for a million squids. Of course, not everyone could afford one. That's when I came up with the idea of referring to Ballybrack as ‘South Killiney’ in our sales bumf.
Nowadays, I realize that this kind of behaviour is wrong. A home shouldn't be regarded as an index of one's social status – it is a shelter from life's turbulent seas, given by God.
I like this passage from the Bible: ‘Is it time for you yourselves to be living in your panelled houses, while this house remains a ruin?’ This is Haggai 1:4 I'm quoting, one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, written about 520 years BC, though I think its lessons remain especially relevant in these consumerist times.
‘Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink but never have your fill. You put on clothes but are not warm. You earn wages only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” T
his is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honoured.”’
AND JUST TO SHOW HOW SERIOUSLY PEOPLE TAKE THE PROPERTY BUSINESS IN THESE PARTS, A WORD FROM FIONN
Dalkey was the main point through which bubonic plague – or the Black Death – entered Ireland in the middle of the fourteenth century. The disease was caused by the bacterium Pasteurella pestis, which was carried by fleas hitching a ride on the backs of rats. It's estimated that between 1348 and 1350 it wiped out one quarter of the entire population of Europe. To this day, the people of Dalkey refuse to speak about the role their town played in one of the worst epidemics mankind has ever known – for fear it would affect local property prices.
Knacker Chic
At some point in their mid to late teens, many boys and girls from Killiney and Dalkey start to effect the behaviour, accent and manners of Dublin's poorer social classes. Most begin speaking with hard, inner-city accents and using coarse language, eventually graduating to shoplifting and accusing strangers of staring at them, or other imagined slights, as a pretext for beating the shit out of them. According to psychologists, Knacker Chic, as it's known, is a simple act of teenage rebellion in which adolescent boys and girls reject their privileged backgrounds and the values of their wealthy parents, often out of feelings of guilt. It's a temporary condition, which usually lasts until they discover just how much money can be made from commercial law or futures.
Shopping
Killiney village consists of little more than a shop and a pub, though Dalkey is heaven for anyone with a bit of room on their Visa card. The twenty-something solicitors and stockbrokers who have been buying up the village's local authority-built shanties are nesting – renovating their new homes and filling them with trendy modern furniture and expensive art.
Dalkey has a number of galleries, including the Tramyard Gallery and the James Gallery, where you can buy wonderful works of art by contemporary Irish artists. As they say in this part of the world, they're the new wallpaper.
It's estimated that each of us spends one third of our lives in bed – or twice that if your parents are wealthy and you grew up in Killiney or Dalkey. Suffice to say
Like Paris, London and New York, Dalkey is justifiably
proud of its cultural quarter, which is situated between
Dalkey Credit Union and Clegg's Shoe Repairs.
that the bedroom is the most important room in your life. The Bedroom Studio will provide you with one that you'll never be ashamed to bring a ‘bird’ back to. Check out the Jensen Supreme Vital with its adjustable massage function, which stimulates blood circulation, relaxing your legs, back, shoulders and neck and providing superior sleeping comfort. You could ride Zara Phillips in that and never feel like you were punching above your weight.
Meanwhile, the Design House will provide you with a cooking and dining area so state-of-the-art that your maid won't want to go home in the evenings. In this little corner of the world you're no one unless you have a handmade kitchen in natural timber with an American-style, two-door fridge and elevated coffee bar.
How to Get There
Dalkey is serviced by the 7D, 8, 46N and 59. It's also on the Dart line, and Dalkey station is right in the middle of the village. Killiney is notoriously difficult to access – the reason they built it on a hill in the first place. The 59 bus is rumoured to go there, but, as they say in these parts, ‘You'll be waishing.’
The Dart does stop at Killiney, but from the station it's a thirty-minute hike uphill to the little village, and the altitude sickness usually claims those intrepid souls who attempt it.
Your best bet is to bring your car. Except there's no parking.
Where to Stay
Fitzpatrick's Castle Hotel in Killiney is an eighteenth-century castle set in rolling parkland on the brow of Killiney Hill, overlooking the bay. Its 113 bedrooms are decorated in traditional style, with warm, dusk tones and dark-wood furnishings, each with Internet access, cable television, a CD player and a games console. They've got a great restaurant (PJ's), an elegant bar (The Library) and a chauffeur who'll pick you up at the airport. The castle's former dungeon was once the site of a famous nightclub (Jesters). Many South Dublin men still make pilgrimages there, revisiting the spot where they got their first ‘bit of tit’.
A WORD FROM CHRISTIAN
Jesters is now, like, the Dungeon Bar. Lauren likes it, but I'm not a fan myself, probably because the word ‘dungeon’ makes me think of the pit underneath Jabba the Hutt's desert palace on, like, Tatooine? I know a lot of people did, but I never felt sorry for the rancor when Luke killed it, although apparently on the planet Dathomir they've actually, like, domesticated these creatures? They're supposed to use them as, like, pack animals and even personal mounts, but I don't know if that's true…
Where to Eat
There's an old saying that in Killiney and Dalkey, there's only one eight o'clock in the day. As home to Ireland's biggest population of people who don't have to get up early in the morning, it's no surprise that in these parts brunch is the favourite meal of the day – or the only meal of the week in the case of the area's emaciated female population.
Dalkey's wonderful In starts dishing it up at ten o'clock every morning and by midday is still serving goat's cheese crostinis and calamari and lychee salads to hungover Trustifarians. Around the corner there's the wonderful Nosh, whose buttermilk pancakes with toasted banana and maple syrup are the only reason many Dalkey and Killiney folk are vertical before one o'clock in the afternoon. And that's not to forget Idlewild, which serves the best cappuccino in all of South Dublin to the backing track of local ladies fighting with each other over the privilege of who's going to pay.
The Main Street in Dalkey has so many good Indian, Thai and Chinese restaurants (Jaipur, Tiger Becs, Kingsland), it's been nicknamed Dalkasia. And if you're the type who knows his turbot from his halibut, the chances are you'll already know about the Guinea Pig, the seafood restaurant of which Dalkey people are smugly proud. They've been serving food out of 17 Railway Road since 1957, when John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, John Ford and Peter Ustinov used to go there to be fed and watered. If you think Bono, Liam Neeson and Cliff Richard have been piling on the
A WORD FROM ROSS
I suppose you could say I'm pretty well known in this port of the world, having had more than my fair share of success with the birds here. There's, like, three schools for girls out that direction – we're talking Holy Child Killiney (Collars Up, Knickers Down), we're talking Loreto Dalkey (Virgins on the Rocks or Whores on the Shore, depending on how lucky you get) and St Joseph of Cluny (the Rich Teas). I know for a fact, roysh, that back in the day the teachers in all those schools used to hand out photographs of me, warning birds to basically stay away from me. It was like, ‘He might be very good-looking, have an unbelievable bod, be an incredible rugby player, have loads of chorm, blah blah blah – but basically you'll end up getting hurt. That's as sure as your dad's going to buy you a cor for your eighteenth.’
Did the warnings work? They did not. I did so much damage out there the Red Cross had to set up a focking shelter to deal with the broken-horted.
pounds lately, it might be because they can't stay away from the place. Dublin prawns. Galway mussels. Wicklow lamb. That's not to forget the Dalkey crab – which is that you have to switch off your mobile phone in the restaurant, preventing the local daddies from telling their friends about how their son has just made the Senior Cup team, at the top of their voices.
Most Dalkey people would tell you they'd probably starve to death were it not for Select Stores, the old-style grocery store that stocks Yogi tea, aubergine pickle, dried kaffir lime leaves and all the other basic necessities.
Entertainment
Fitzpatrick's Castle Hotel has a leisure centre with a fully equipped gym, 22-m pool, on-deck jetted spa, Scandinavian wood sauna and steam room. Y
oung mums gather in the beauty salon every morning to enjoy aromatherapy and reflexology and talk about how little Conor or Emily said their first word the other day and it was ‘focaccia’.
Killiney Golf Club on Ballinclea Road is a nine-hole parkland course that features some of the most spectacular scenic views anywhere in Ireland. It's often unfairly characterized as a club for middle-aged ‘yaws’ and old farts. Killiney welcomes visitors, of all things, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Admittedly, though, its nine holes make it the ideal South Dublin course for Alzheimer's sufferers.
The car park at Dalkey Hill is the most popular venue for having sex outdoors in South Dublin. Make sure to get there early, though. By 11.00 pm it's usually full of teenage boys fumbling with bra straps in their mothers’ Fiat Puntos.
Killiney Beach is the most beautiful stretch of coastline in South Dublin, though bathers should beware: the water might look inviting, but fifteen minutes in there and you're unlikely to see your testicles again for a fortnight.
Yogalates is the craze that's sweeping Killiney and Dalkey like… well, like the plague of 1348. It's an internationally popular form of exercise that blends the best of the ancient Yogic spiritual discipline with the skeletal exercise dynamics of Pilates. There are literally hundreds of classes available in the area. Each session
finishes with the chanting of the Sanskrit word Namaste, which means, ‘The Divine in me recognizes the Divine in you’. Interestingly, divine happens to be Killiney and Dalkey's most popular word, and you will hear it used to describe everything from a walnut-and-chrome table lamp to a walnut-and-mango muffin.
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