Ranelagh/Rathmines Alternative History

rcarron · 02-02-2011 07:46PM #1

I live in Ranelagh and got a taxi home last night with a rather interesting character. On the way home he gave me a rather interesting history lesson about Ranelagh and Rathmines, explaining that back in the 60s and 70s they were controlled by local gangs who where rather violent. He talked about Dance halls in Mount Pleasant Square and Chelmsford Lane where huge gang fights and killings occured weekly. He also mentioned a huge ammount of brothels opperated in the area, especially around the belgrave park which were controlled by the gangs.

Has anyone else heard or know anything about this part of Ranelagh's history? I haven't been able to find much information on the net thus far and would love to learn more about it.

donaghs · 03-02-2011 04:47PM

rcarron wrote: »

I live in Ranelagh and got a taxi home last night with a rather interesting character. On the way home he gave me a rather interesting history lesson about Ranelagh and Rathmines, explaining that back in the 60s and 70s they were controlled by local gangs who where rather violent. He talked about Dance halls in Mount Pleasant Square and Chelmsford Lane where huge gang fights and killings occured weekly. He also mentioned a huge ammount of brothels opperated in the area, especially around the belgrave park which were controlled by the gangs.

Has anyone else heard or know anything about this part of Ranelagh's history? I haven't been able to find much information on the net thus far and would love to learn more about it.

Earlier post here on "Mountpleasant Buildings", a bad slum in a small geographical area just behind "The Hill" pub. I think its called "Swan Grove" now. Rebuilt as Corpo housing but in a more low-density and tenant-friendly style. There's a thread here on it in dublin.ie
http://www.dublin.ie/forums/showthread.php?4979-mount-pleasant-buildings/page36
This would have impacted on the character of the area somewhat.

There was also Corpo flats at Hollyfield in Rathmines, were "the General" Martin Cahill grew up. And he was actually rehoused in Swan Grove.

Havent heard any of those specific stories as they took place before I was born, but I think its indicative of how Dublin has changed, and how "posh" areas like Ranelagh, Rathmines, Dalkey etc would have had a far greater social mix of people in the past.

donaghs · 03-02-2011 04:58PM

It think Hollyfields was also rebuilt as low-density Corpo housing. I think its located on the way from Rathmines village to Darty on the right. Across the road from a small park. Now called "Rathmines Close".

PatsytheNazi · 03-02-2011 05:20PM

Didn't think that Rathmines/Ranelagh were violent places though I suppose been Irish having a punch up is one of our favourite past times. Interestingly, in the 1918 election Rathmines/Ranelagh returned a unionist candidate Sir Maurice Dockrell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Dockrell_(1850%E2%80%931929)

Also the first balloon flight in Ireland occured in Ranelagh on January 1785.

http://ediewynne.ie/2010/04/27/ranelagh-commemorates-first-balloon-flight-in-ireland/

donaghs · 03-02-2011 05:34PM

Upper Rathmines Road had an Orange Lodge also, now in use as a Gospel Church:http://www.gospel.ie/index.html

CDfm · 03-02-2011 07:49PM

A fantastic thread idea.

In the 1960's Patrick Kavanagh lived in the area and it was certainly bedsit land for lots of people for years. Builders labourers, shop workers, civil & public servants up from the country all lived there.

You also had a synagogue there.

From memory during the mid 80's the Triangle in Ranelagh was a pick up point for "streetwalkers" . There was a redbrick public toilet there and this was demolished sometime in the 1980's.

I seem to remember a petrol bombing of a girl's flat and massage parlours in the area back then.

If the Sunday World has an archive you might strke gold.

I also saw a book " the General & I a few years back about some guy who had a hotdog stand and that Martin Cahill -the General put the strong arm on him.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Autobiography
Review by James Laffey

The General and I

By Wolfgang Eulitz

Maverick House, 196pp Paperback, €10.99
IT WILl soon be twelve years since the death of Dublin criminal, Martin Cahill (aka ‘The General’) but the public fascination with the notorious crime boss remains undiluted.

Wolfgang Eulitz’s The General and I may seem like a spoof, Pythonesque read at first glance, particularly when one takes in the sub-heading ‘The Story of Martin Cahill’s Hotdog Wars’. But Eulitz’s tale is anything other than a wind-up. It is, in fact, a chilling account of an ordinary man’s extraordinary dealings with one of the most ruthless criminals of his era.

There aren’t too many crime bosses who have been as breathlessly eulogised in death as Martin Cahill. He has been the subject of several books and two autobiographical films - one more sympathetic than the other. Cahill, it seems, was some misunderstood Robin Hood who had them all rolling in the aisles as he led the Gardaí a merry dance around Dublin in the 1980s. The truth, however, is rather different.

When a social welfare officer signed a letter ending his dole payments, Cahill immediately had the man shot in both legs. Here was a civil servant simply doing his job - the decision to stop the dole had been made at a higher level - but that sort of logic was lost on a thug like Martin Cahill. He didn’t take kindly to personal slights.

Martin Cahill and his cronies had witnessed the success of the Leeson Street hot-dog stands and they were determined to muscle in on the action.

They weren’t interested in conventional commercial competition or fair trade: the only language they knew was intimidation. Eulitz was soon feeling the pressure.

After several verbal threats, Cahill set about destroying his competitor’s business. He did it by the only method that was familiar to him: thuggery. He pursued Eulitz with a vengeance that was quite frightening and some of the events that are recalled in this book are spine-chilling.

The bullying, boorish behaviour of Cahill was inexcusable and Eulitz’s story goes a long way towards dispelling the notion that ‘The General’ was really a good guy at heart. He was anything but. He was the lowest of the low, a cruel, sadistic and selfish thug who was no friend to the ordinary, working class people of his native city.

http://www.westernpeople.ie/news/story/?trs=mhkfeyaumh

Anyone who hadn't seen Syl Fox the Comedian in the Lower Deck on a Sunday morning hadn't been there.

zagmund · 03-02-2011 08:05PM

I remember something about Leeson Street hot dog stands alright, but not the details.

I lived in Ranelagh on and off during the later part of the 80s and I don't remember much in the way of what's described above.

My dads family lived and had a shop on the main street since some time in the '50s and the only thing I had heard of was that burglary was pretty common (certainly from the 80s onwards) and it got to the stage where all the house windows were pretty well barred up and cash was not kept on the premises where possible. Word (from the Gardai) was that it was a particular crew from Charlemont Street that used to cross over the canal and hit all the premises on Ranelagh.

I never, ever noticed anything odd going on at the Triangle (or was it the Angle ?) but I may have been too young/innocent to notice it.

I can imagine with all the bedsit accommodation that there were plenty of alternative enterprises going on *in the background* but I would have thought that Ranelagh itself was relatively sound. Any baddies would have got a whack on the head from the blue rinse brigade on their way back from mass in the morning if they stepped out of line.

z

p.s. anyone on for a remembrances of Ranelagh thread (as distinct from remembrances of crime in Ranelagh one) ?

CDfm · 03-02-2011 08:35PM

zagmund wrote: »

I lived in Ranelagh on and off during the later part of the 80s and I don't remember much in the way of what's described above.

I never, ever noticed anything odd going on at the Triangle (or was it the Angle ?) but I may have been too young/innocent to notice it.

I am usually blissfully unaware of these things too.

Recently, one guy Tony Felloni showed up in the news on his release from prison. People forget how poverty stricken parts of Ireland were.

At just 15, Tony's first scam was both ruthless and cunning, traits he would later become synonymous with. In the 1950s, on Mountjoy Square in the north inner city, stood a house where young women rented rooms when they moved up to Dublin from the country. A teenage Tony, full of charm and confidence, used to hang around outside and get talking to the women.

"He'd take them out. He was a good-looking and charming young man. He'd get them to take their clothes off for him and he'd take photos," says a man who knew Felloni as a youngster but who asked not to be named.

"Then he'd blackmail them. Threaten to send the photos back to their parents. They'd always hand over the money."

Within a few years, young Felloni had refined his method of taking advantage of women and gone several steps further. He had already figured that his personal charm could be put to illicit purposes, but he combined this with a violent side. He began to operate brothels around Dublin's inner city but had an unorthodox way of attracting women to work as prostitutes for him. He forced them. Felloni did what he did best – he preyed on the weak.

Many of the women he targeted had moved to Dublin from the countryside. Selling himself as a friendly landlord in the big city, he offered women cheap accommodation and then forced them to become prostitutes to pay for their keep. He met many women who later sold their bodies on his behalf outside the GPO on O'Connell Street, his trial would later be told. Women liked him, until they got better acquainted with his personality.

His prostitution racket began to grow, as did his reputation as a violent man. He used to viciously beat women who tried to escape his brothels. Soon, the gardaí began to take an interest. And in 1964, he was convicted of procuring young girls for immoral purposes and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

Like so many others before him, prison did not provide the sharp shock necessary to scare Felloni straight. As the '60s turned into the '70s in Dublin, he began to realise where the real money was. In drugs, not vice.

http://www.tribune.ie/news/article/2011/jan/30/he-laid-waste-to-dublins-inner-city-and-to-his-own/

p.s. anyone on for a remembrances of Ranelagh thread (as distinct from remembrances of crime in Ranelagh one) ?

That is a great idea.

You really did have a community there and the army barracks, sports bars, and lots else going on.

What do you think OP ???

baalthor · 07-02-2011 02:59AM

CDfm wrote: »

I also saw a book " the General & I a few years back about some guy who had a hotdog stand and that Martin Cahill -the General put the strong arm on him.

His mother was Eamon Dunphy's girlfriend at the time ! (The hotdog guy not the General:D)

OT: When the Berlin Wall came down, she travelled back to East Germany leading Eamonn McCann to comment: "At a time when hundreds of thousand of Germans poured across the iron curtain from East to West, one person went in the opposite direction ...."

OP: there definitely wouldn't have been killings "every week". There probably wouldn't have been a murder every week in the whole country during the 60s and 70s.

CDfm · 07-02-2011 10:06AM

baalthor wrote: »

His mother was Eamon Dunphy's girlfriend at the time ! (The hotdog guy not the General:D)

OT: When the Berlin Wall came down, she travelled back to East Germany leading Eamonn McCann to comment: "At a time when hundreds of thousand of Germans poured across the iron curtain from East to West, one person went in the opposite direction ...."

:D LOL -thats so bad.

A bit of scene setting on Rathmines

Rathmines – Dublin 6

by Maura Byrne (August 2008) Rathmines is one of Dublin’s more cosmopolitan and livelier suburbs. Dubbed ‘Flatland’ by the media due to the glut of cheap rental accommodation available, the area has long been popular with students, young office workers and immigrants. It can be quieter at weekends, coming alive again on a Sunday night when the students return from the country, laden down with bags of clean washing and home-made dinners from mammy.

Sights
Almost all amenities are situated along the Lower and Upper Rathmines Road. The famous green dome of the Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinner's Church, can been seen for miles across the city. Originally the dome was intended to be for St Petersburg but due to various social and political upheavals at the time, it somehow ended up in Dublin.

Also worth a look are the clock tower of Rathmines College, the library and Kodak House, a prominent Art Deco building dating from the 1930’s located on the corner of Lower Rathmines Road and Blackberry Lane.
History
Many inhabitants are unaware that up to 5,000 died here in the 1649 Battle of Rathmines, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Further bloodshed occurred more recently in 1928 on leafy Dartry Road, when IRA Timothy Coughlin was controversially killed by police informer Sean Harling. Rathmines is also home to many of the units of the Irish Army in the Cathal Brugha Barracks.

http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/article/rathmines-dublin-neighbourhood-of-the-month

InTheTrees · 07-02-2011 05:45PM

There were some flats around the end of oxford road and mountpleasant in the 70's and maybe early 80's that were known for certain activities...

I used to live around the corner in charleston road.

sensibleken · 09-02-2011 11:45AM

Ive lived around ranelagh rathmines for about 5 years and always thought it was the nicest area in dublin. but recently moved up behind the hill pub and its definetely a bit dodgy. Less than a month after we moved in we got burgled, the cops are a constant presence and cars being broken into are a daily occurence at this rate. Kip!

CDfm · 09-02-2011 12:16PM

They could be descendants of Richard Earl of Ranelagh

http://books.google.ie/books?id=s7gTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT16&lpg=PT16&dq=ranelagh+crime+history&source=bl&ots=U96jp4u9kn&sig=t_8ZL48SRzbp7RGigPBMhgm4TtE&hl=en&ei=eHZSTaObJ426hAeCwuyRCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

This was largely achieved through short payment of the Irish army which was Ranelagh's training ground for his later embezzlements as Paymaster General to the English army.

Ranelagh was expelled from the Commons in 1703 when discrepancies were found in his accounts as Paymaster, and he was discovered to have appropriated more than £900,000 of public finds.
[edit] Family and later life

Ranelagh was well known in his time for enjoying life. He had a wife and three daughters, but there are suggestions that he was at least bisexual, and that he led a rakish life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jones,_1st_Earl_of_Ranelagh

11-11-2012 12:44PM

This post, amongst other things, spurred me on to write this:

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/10/a-divided-rathmines/

As a poster on Boards.ie stated recently – “Rathmines has always been odd like that, in that you have … urban poverty mixed in closely with affluence.”

From the early 1900s to the late 1970s, only a couple of streets separated the gorgeous Georgian houses of Mount Pleasant Square and the poverty-stricken slum of Mount Pleasant Buildings.

Mount Pleasant Square, described by Susan Roundtre “as one of the most beautiful early 19th-century squares in Dublin” and by GrahamH from Archiseek as “one of the most charming enclaves of Georgian houses in the city”, was built in the 1830s. Mainly occupied by doctors and solicitors, they had squash, badminton and tennis courts as well as a private garden on their doorstep.

Mount Pleasant Buildings, a stones throw away, were a block of ten large flats situated in a small area on the hill between Ranelagh and Rathmines. They later became a by-word for poverty and bad planning.

InTheTrees · 13-11-2012 08:02PM

I was born in the building that is now Portebello College just over Rathmines bridge.

As a student I remember Rathmines and Ranelagh in the late 70's and early 80's as a student area. Lots of young people. Lots of flats to rent etc. It was fun. Lots of house parties every weekend.

And although I remember buying weed from the dubious folks who lived in the tennaments around oxford road I dont remember a lot of crime and I particularly don't remember hookers frequenting the area. Or brothels for that matter. (I would have remembered surely!)

Although as a starving student I probably wasn't considered a potential customer.

steddyeddy · 14-11-2012 02:36AM

Well Rathmines and Kimmage had local gangs in the 60s called the animal gang. Ill try and dig out more about it.

slowburner · 14-11-2012 09:22AM

I remember Ranelagh in the 70s too. Mount Pleasant, or the area behind it, was a definite no-go area.
In spite of this, the village itself had very much a country feel to it. Student numbers were lower, and most flats were occupied by nurses and guards.
There were three or four pubs, a few newsagents, a butchers', and fruit & veg shops - nothing out of the ordinary.
There was an eatery which was legendary for comforting home style food, served and cooked in that infamous Irish rural style. A bowl of kidneys was a signature dish, and spuds boiled in their skins, and sliced pan, and butter in abundance.
There was a large garage, Shanahans, which was the place for Morris Minors.
I think McCarthy's shoe shop is still there? How many mothers were so grateful for this place, where shoes with slight imperfections were sold at knockdown prices. The owner used to disappear off behind the perilous towers of Clarkes boxes in search of the right pair, with a torch, and he absolutely always found the shoes to fit.

If memory serves, the hot-dog guy intimidated by the general (didn't he have his leg/s broken?) was known as 'Wolf Man'. I think his surname was Wolfe.

andrew241983 · 14-11-2012 09:35AM

you will find things in ranelagh and rathmines haven't changed much ye just need to be living close enough to it...i live in the old holyfield buildings...and in the last few years especially its gone very bad...also remember finding a shotgun and hand gun and loads of black clothes down a man hole when i was about 10(we all suspected who they belonged to)

InTheTrees · 15-11-2012 05:02PM

There was a video game arcade in the triangle for a while. ANyone remember that place? 1979-80ish.

I remember playing one of the first 3d games there. Atari's Battlezone.

Did I ever imagine that within 15 years I'd be working at Atari in Silicon Valley?

donaghs · 16-11-2012 10:05AM

Wasn't that part of Jason's Snooker/Pool Hall? Gradually Jason's reduced in size. Is it totally gone now?

It would appear so, from reading this guy's site. Apparently a Lidl is going in there.
http://www.eoghanmurphy.ie/2012/08/30/new-developments-in-ranelagh/
Nothing wrong with that per se, but the building in the picture does look a bit ugly and out of character with the older buildings around there.

Apparently Ken Doherty began his snooker career in Jasons.

InTheTrees · 16-11-2012 05:03PM

donaghs wrote: »

Wasn't that part of Jason's Snooker/Pool Hall? Gradually Jason's reduced in size. Is it totally gone now?

You're right. It looks like its still there according to Google Street view. Although soon to be a Lidl. Probably not such a bad thing really...

Its a shame to lose the facade of the old buildings though.

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=53.325225,-6.254764&spn=0.001097,0.002629&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=53.325098,-6.25453&panoid=tYVludxdSYnJXATBz86WjQ&cbp=12,2.87,,0,3.54

Luca Brasi · 28-11-2012 07:36PM

Wilfred Brambell who used play Steptoe in Steptoe and Son was raised on Edenvale Road near the Beechwood Luas station. "Not a lot of people know that"

Ranelagh/Rathmines Alternative History

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