Building: Abbeville, Kinsealy
Architect(s): James Gandon, Sam Stephenson et al
There’s a stretch of north Dublin across which can be traced Charles Haughey’s trajectory through the Irish twentieth century. It runs northwards for ten kilometres along the Malahide Road, between the Corporation-built suburb in Donnycarney where he spent much of his childhood, and the near-rural Kinsealy, where the big house that served as his based during his years of power still stands. You can travel that trajectory by bus: I went on the number 15, walking the last couple of miles having disembarked next to Clare Hall shopping centre.
At Kinsealy, a lane-way leads from the road towards a set of iron gates, beyond which is Abbeville, the empty stately home – recently sold for a knockdown price to a Japanese businessman – that was once the residence of Haughey, who served as Taoiseach of Ireland for three spells between 1979 and 1992. (Haughey died in 2006.)
Haughey was a figure who seemed larger than life, and certainly larger than his own party, Fianna Fáil. His narrow-eyed, lizardly features were an ever-present in Irish politics when I was growing up, and his house at Abbeville was pointed at whenever my family drove by. It was always ‘somewhere over there’ and surrounded by trees. Such indeterminate geography seemed to suit a figure whose movements were simultaneously highly public and extremely covert.
When Haughey was first elected as a TD, in 1957, he was living with his young family at 490 Howth Road, a semi-detached house near Raheny village. It wasn’t enough. Subsequently he moved to Grangemore, a mansion in Donaghmede. Later, he sold the land at Grangemore for development – the house itself was razed – and bought Abbeville.
Abbeville had been expanded in the 1790s from an earlier structure. In its current form it consists of a two-storey seven-bay structure that’s bracketed between two wide curved bows which are extended in turn by single-storey, single-bay wings. (Photos of the building can sometimes make it resemble an oversized regional Garda station – probably as a result of the tall television aerial protruding from its roof.) At the time of its expansion in the eighteenth century the house was occupied by John Beresford, an MP for Waterford who had been made Ireland’s commissioner of revenue in 1770. He had overseen architect James Gandon’s construction of a new Custom House for Dublin, which was opened in 1791. It’s thought that Gandon also worked on Abbeville.
Abbeville provided the flattering mirror image that Haughey craved. By occupying Beresford’s estate he was both aping and modifying the model of its eighteenth century owner. He wanted to play the king and the rebel simultaneously. “I like to think about its history,” he once said of the house.
Haughey’s approach to Abbeville seems particularly postmodern: combining history and belief in an often contradictory and idiosyncratic manner. His friend, architect Arthur Gibney, described Haughey in this way: “He is capable of picking up patterns from the past which are fascinating, and I am delighted that he is able to indulge in them. He is a curious mixture of the past and future”.
As I stood at the gate of Abbeville I noticed how close the house was to the flight path into Dublin airport, and recalled how, when returning from abroad, I’d often glimpse this largely eighteenth century building from the plane as it wobbled in crosswinds on its descent.
Once, while sick, Haughey held a cabinet meeting at the house, sitting in his dressing gown while conducting business from the head of the table. But the vast house never seemed a comfortable fit. Photos taken of the Haughey family at Abbeville show them looking ill at ease amongst antiques and plush furniture, as if they had accidentally wandered into a museum. To make the place more homely, Haughey had the architect Sam Stephenson construct a wood panelled ‘Irish’ pub in one ground floor wing. To add a personal touch, Haughey propped images of himself on the shelves behind the bar.
Words: Karl Whitney
Karl Whitney is the author of Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin, published by Penguin Ireland in September 2014.
