South Dublin Read online

Thomas's, purveyors of fine food, is an institution in Foxrock. No one asks for jam here, they ask for wild blueberry preserve with a hint of lavender. Or goose fat. Or pink lemonade. Or wine with real dust on the bottle. Or a type of muesli that looks so like pot-pourri you won't know whether to eat it or put it in a bowl on top of the toilet cistern as an alternative to lighting matches.

  Entertainment

  Foxrock has its own variation of the turning on of the Christmas lights. On the first Friday night in December the local ladies congregate in the village to show off their new Da Vinci Veneers – the brilliant-white ceramic caps they have fixed to their teeth at €700 apiece. On a count of three, they suddenly smile, creating a spectacular flash in the night sky that is said to be visible from as far away as Anglesey.

  St Stephen's Day at Leopardstown Racecourse is when all of Foxrock comes out to show its plumage. There's an unofficial competition among the ladies for the best Philip Treacy-designed hat, while the men wager ostentatious bets, almost always on the favourite.

  Finally, in the early hours of the morning, after Club 92 has shut its doors, there's the annual Losing of the Virginity, when girls half-cut on Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezers have sex for the first time on the racecourse, while a crowd watching from the main stand shout her home. Later that day there's the lesser-known Getting of the Morning-After Pill, which tends to be an all-female affair.

  Pubs and Clubs

  Foxrock is famously the only village in Ireland without a pub, as they're considered even more working class than dying for Ireland. The nearby Leopardstown racecourse has a number of bars, however, the most popular of which is the slightly risqué-sounding Fillies. It's not, as the name might imply, wall to wall with girls

  TWO VERY DIFFERENT VIEWS ON CLUB 92 FROM JP AND ROSS

  I always enjoyed Club 92. There's nothing wrong with dancing, of course. When David killed the Philistine, didn't the women of Israel greet King Saul with singing and dancing and joyful songs and tambourines and lutes?

  ‘Let them praise His name with dancing.’ That's

  Psalms 149:3, that is.

  Ninety-two. Knackery Doo. Shoot Your Goo. Call it what you like, but it's not for nothing that Club 92 is Dublin's official Club d’Amour. It's not your usual sweating hogpen, where mulchies in bogball jerseys go to bag off with nurses. There're no tight Levis and Ben Sherman shirts untucked in the Club of Love. No, this is the highest density of quality Blankers-Koen per square yord in the world, and the easiest place in Ireland to cop off with something decent on a Thursday or a Sunday night. Seriously goys, if you don't get it in there, you might as well take a blunt scissors to the thing.

  of persuadable virtue, but rather a Continental-style café bar – the kind of place we'll all be drinking in if Michael McDowell has his way.

  Then there's the world-famous Club 92. It holds 1,200 bodies, but women tend to outnumber men by a ratio of 2:1. You have to like those odds. When you pass under the iconic Club of Love sign and through those double doors, you'll feel like Brad Pitt. If you don't cop off in Club 92, the bouncers will give you a hug on the way out.

  Other Highlights in Foxrock

  At the Leopardstown Golf Centre you can perfect your drive, chip or putt – or why not just hang around the seventy-four-bay, floodlit driving range and watch men and women engage in swinging, Foxrock-style – complete with video cameras. In the pursuit of the perfect golf game, many Foxrock mommies and daddies go to the lengths of filming their swings, using a camcorder mounted on a tripod and connected to a laptop. Watch them quietly despair about their ‘glitch at seven o'clock’.

  If you want to watch Foxrock folk really tearing their hair out, the QBC is the place to be. The Foxrock QBC – or Quality Bus Corridor – is a traffic lane reserved for buses and taxis only and runs from Foxrock Church right into Dublin City Centre. Foxrock's natural aversion towards public transport is turned into something approaching road rage by the sight of 46A after 46A tearing along wide, open road while they inch their Mercs and Jags forward in the gridlock.

  Foxrock ladies love charity events, whatever the cause. Whether it's Roulades for Romania, Flans for Fibrosis or Cocktails for the Kidney Foundation, they can be relied upon to turn up en masse – provided, of course, that VIP or Tatler have a photographer there.

  Suggested Itinerary in Foxrock

  Stand on the Stillorgan dual-carriageway, just south of Foxrock church, and watch some of the biggest and most expensive cars in Ireland make the left turn off Westminster Road. Enjoy a brunch of Eggs Benedict on wheaten bread at the Gables, eavesdropping on Fionnuala, Delma and the girls as they compare body-balance programmes or discuss the likely contenders for the lady captain's prize. Walk up and down Westminster, Brighton and Torquay roads, admiring the homes of the fabulously rich through any gaps you can find in the privet hedges. Get arrested. Released around 10.00 pm. Bed.

  FINALLY, A WORD TO THE UNWARY – FROM ROSS

  There's, like, a lot of people, roysh, who claim to be from Foxrock when they're actually not. They're from, like, Carrickmines, Sandyford, Deansgrange, even as far away as Cornelscourt. They're, like, total impostors. Club 92 is full of them. I'm one of the chosen few who can put my hand on my hort and say, ‘I'm actually from Foxrock,’ except that if you are from Foxrock, it's considered, like, vulgar to say it. Even when you're giving your address, you just put Brighton Road or Torquay Road and then Dublin 18.

  5. Blackrock & Booterstown

  Hang on to your underpants – you are now entering Jockland! Blackrock and Booterstown were once described as being like a big piss-up in a rugby club bar. This is the home of the high-five, birthplace of drinking games like Mince Pies and Chariots of Fire, and the town that gave the world the atomic wedgy. But there's more to Blackrock and Booterstown than fun and games that can cause you to lose a testicle. As the site of Ireland's most prestigious secondary school, this region of South Dublin could be described as the Cradle of the Celtic Tiger, the area that turned out the brains that brought about Ireland's economic miracle…

  Bob Geldof is, for many people, the quintessential

  South Dubliner, with his Blackrock College education,

  his highly conspicuous charity work and his penchant

  for telling people to fock off

  Blackrock is the birthplace of Bob Geldof, the site of Ireland's most exclusive hospital and the scene of some of the worst traffic congestion in the entire world. In fact, in 2004 a delegation of Mexican public officials looking for solutions to their capital's gridlock visited Blackrock, and then decided their traffic jams weren't so bad after all. They went home and spent their budget on a tequila theme park instead.

  Blackrock's primary association is with rugby, however, and it has produced such famous names as Fergus Slattery, Neil Francis, Brendan Mullin and Brian O'Driscoll – and such imaginative nicknames as Slats, Franno, Brenny and Drico. The people here are a wonderfully stuck-up lot. Young girls between the ages of eight and ten wear specially adapted neck braces to teach them how to walk with their noses in the air, while the Marks & Spencer in Blackrock has more yummy-mummies per square foot of retail space than any other outlet in Ireland or the United Kingdom.

  Blackrock is also justly famous for having some of Dublin's most beautiful and historically important buildings demolished to make way for shopping centres and housing estates. Frescati House, the childhood home of Lord Edward FitzGerald, leader of the United Irishmen during the 1798 rebellion, is now the car park of the Frascati Centre, while Talbot Lodge, the nursing home where Éamon de Valera died, was bulldozed in the early 1990s to make room for more big houses.

  The people here love to shop, and in Blackrock they have not one but two of the swankiest shopping centres anywhere in Ireland, not to mention Superquinn, with its world-famous fresh bread.

  If you visit Blackrock, you'll get to see some of the brattiest children alive. Moms and dads in this part of the world think it's important for their children to express the
mselves – even if that means little Cillian screaming his lungs out while you quietly die of a hangover at the next table in any of the town's excellent coffee shops.

  On the Blackrock seafront lie the dilapidated remains of the old Victorian swimming baths, whose high-diving board is one of the most famous features on the South Dublin skyline and a bleak reminder of an extinct civilization of poor people who once called Blackrock home. Happily, not any more. You'd be fortunate to find a decent house here for less than €1 or €2 million on a street with no satellite dishes.

  History

  Blackrock was originally called Newtown-on-the-Strand and was renamed Blackrock after the large black rocks that could be seen offshore at low tide. In medieval times, before Sandymount and Ballsbridge were settled, they marked the edge of the area controlled by the city of Dublin, in other words, the beginning of the Southside.

  Booterstown means ‘the town of the road’ – not the ugly, gridlocked one that cuts a swathe through it nowadays, but Slighe Cualann, one of the five great roads of ancient Ireland that once ran through it.

  By the mid eighteenth century, towards the end of the reign of King George II, Blackrock and Booterstown had become fashionable seaside resorts popular with the upper classes. At that point in their history they appeared to have it all – money, good looks, sea views … then it all went horribly wrong. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained – lead in the water supply is one theory – the area suddenly embraced revolutionary nationalism. Almost overnight, Blackrock and Booterstown had more violent republicans than you'd find at a Wolfe Tones concert in Bray.

  Lord Edward FitzGerald, who grew up in Frescati House, led the United Irishmen during the 1798 rebellion. James Stephens, from George's Avenue in Blackrock, founded the Fenians in around 1850, of which Charles Kickham, from Montpelier Place, was a leading member. Eoin MacNeill, from South Hill Avenue in Booterstown, was chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers during the 1916 Rising, while Éamon de Valera, who spent most of his life in Blackrock, once hid a revolver underneath the altar in the chapel in Blackrock College in his early days as a revolutionary. At one point the British considered closing all of its military prison camps in Ireland and erecting a big fence around Blackrock and Booterstown instead.

  Sensitivity about the part their area played in severing ties with Britain might explain why the locals were happy to see so many buildings of historic interest turned into shopping centres, including FitzGerald's own Frescati House, of which he wrote in a letter to his mother: ‘I am sitting in the bay window with all those pleasant feelings which the fine weather, the pretty place, the singing birds, the pretty wife and Frescati give me.’ It's reassuring to know that some traditions survived the wrecking ball. Today, the place is still very much associated with birds and pretty wives.

  Famous Residents

  Count John McCormack, the famous tenor, lived on the Rock Road in Booterstown. His performance at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932 was watched by a live audience of one million people and is remembered to this day as Ireland's first-ever super-concert, some seventy years before the first Oxegen music festival.

  Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen, grew up in Blackrock, as did Bob Geldof and lots of violent nationalists the locals would prefer to think of as someone else's. Sir William Orpen, official war painter during the First World War, was born in Stillorgan. During his days as a draughtsman he also designed a housing estate, not – as his experience of the horrors of the Western Front might lead you to believe – in Bray or Coolock, but in Stillorgan itself.

  Blackrock College

  Everyone hates them and they don't care. And why would they? Ireland's very own Eton has been turning out brainy boys since the time of the Famine, and a huge number of Ireland's high-achievers in the arenas of finance, law, sport and the arts have passed through Williamstown's hallowed halls. If Rock boys come across as superior, it's simply because they are.

  Among its famous alumni are Éamon de Valera and John Charles McQuaid, former Taoiseach and former Archbishop of Dublin respectively, who helped shape modern Ireland – or, rather, the Ireland that came before modern Ireland, which to be honest was a bit of a shithole.

  Blackrock College is synonymous with rugby. The school has won the Leinster Schools Senior Cup an astonishing sixty-five times and has been contributing players to the Ireland team for as long as the game has been played. Brian O'Driscoll, Fergus Slattery and Brendan Mullin all learned to play rugby in the famous baby-blue and white hoops of ‘Rock’.

  The school is also proud of people like Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty, Padraic Ó Conaire and Anthony Cronin, who overcame the crippling

  The famous gates of Blackrock College, South

  Dublin's very own Eton. Abandon the price of a

  decent-sized family car, all ye who enter.

  handicap of not being very good at rugby to forge a living for themselves as writers.

  The school was founded by a Frenchman, Père Jules Leman, a member of the Holy Ghost order who travelled to Ireland in 1859 to recruit missionaries for Africa. On his arrival, Leman was shocked to discover a nation of thickos, this being the days before expensive grind schools. He decided to set up an élite institute of education, and in 1860 the order acquired Castle Dawson and almost 60 acres of land between Blackrock and Booterstown for its school. It was originally known as The French College, though the style of schooling was more Anglocentric than anything else.

  A WORD FROM ROSS

  I'm not what you would call a reader, roysh, but it was actually JP who pointed out to me that bit in Bob Geldof's autobiography where he grabbed the old man's Beamer or whatever, drove up to Rock and did a load of u-eys and handbrake turns, basically ripping the shit out of the pitch.

  So the first time I did sixth year, roysh, I had the idea of following in Geldof's, well, tyre tracks. I was egged on, it has to be said, by Fr Fehily, our principal, who gave me the keys to Brother Alphonsus's Volvo along with a warning that if I was caught, I was of course on my own and the school would have to, like, disown me and deny any prior knowledge of the operation, which was fair enough.

  So this Thursday night, roysh, I hit Blackrock, pull off the Rock Road into the place and head straight for the main rugby pitch, which is where Drico and the boys would have been, like, training every day. So I drive onto the pitch and I'm about to do my first handbrake turn, roysh, smack in the middle, when all of a sudden, these goys appear from, like, nowhere, we're talking seven or eight of them, we're talking boarders and they just, like, surrounded the cor. They're all giving it, ‘Who is this goy?’ and ‘What's he doing here?’ and of course I'm kacking it, roysh, thinking, I am SO focked if they call the Feds. So I decide to play it Kool and the Gang, roysh. I wind down the window and I go, ‘Sorry, I'm lost. Must have taken, like, a wrong turn onto the pitch and shit?’ And they're looking at me, roysh, going, Should we believe him? Then one of them turns around and he's like, ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ and suddenly I'm put on the spot, roysh, and I end up going, ‘I'm, em, looking to buy a Christmas tree.’ Well, they seemed happy enough with that until one of the goys copped that it was the first week in February and one of the others went, ‘Hey, that's Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, the outhalf from Castlerock who's a seriously shit-hot rugby player and is SO going to play for Ireland one day,’ and that's when all hell broke loose.

  I've had wedgys courtesy of pretty much every school worth mentioning in the Leinster area, but I never had one like this. One of my stones didn't drop again until the second week in March.

  Despite the insane wealth of most of the parents who send their sons there, the school has a proud record of carrying out charitable works. The sale of Christmas trees raises in the region of €100,000 for St Vincent de Paul every year. Included among the school's past pupils are the Legion of Mary founder Frank Duff and Bob Geldof, who, through Band Aid, Live Aid and Live 8, raised hundreds of millions of poun
ds towards famine relief in Africa. It's believed that if Geldof succeeds in his goal of ending world poverty, the school might even forgive him for saying on The Late Late Show that the place was a dump and for making shit of the rugby pitch by performing wheelspins on it in his old man's car – a stunt that made him an instant hero with anyone who ever went to Terenure College, Gonzaga, Clongowes, Belvedere College, St Michael's College, St Mary's College, CBC Monkstown, St Andrew's College, Pres Bray, CUS, Templeogue College…

  Good Old Boys

  It's often said that once you go to Blackrock College, you never really leave and it's true that most of the school's former students maintain a lifelong allegiance to their old alma mater. This is far from unusual in South Dublin. The past pupils of most of the area's élite, fee-paying secondary schools see themselves as part of an informal, fraternal organization bound together by shared interests, beliefs and values. ‘Old boys’, as they're known, always help each other out, in a manner similar to the Freemasons.

  Below is the kind of conversation that might take place at a job interview involving an employer and interviewee, both of whom attended the same prestigious South Dublin secondary school:

  Interviewee: Sorry I'm late. Just couldn't get my shit together today.

  Employer: Well, you're here now…

  Interviewee: Yeah, in body more than spirit, it has to be said. No, I had a serious amount to drink last night. I think I actually woke up still mullered.

  Employer: Em, look, shall we start? I, em, see from your curriculum vitae that you've never worked in a bank before?