Page 85 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

Terrace. Built to house the coastguards, who moved to this site
in 1843 from the former coastguard station at Blacklion, these
premises consisted of a two-storey officer’s house (Trafalgar
House) and a row of cottages, together with a boat-house. Some
of the cottages later housed small businesses – one was a
haberdashery, another a tea-room and ice-cream parlour.

On the other side of the road, at the corner of Trafalgar Road
and Sidmonton Road, is the site of yet another of Greystones’s
now-vanished hotels, the Braemar, and a little further on, behind
the wall and adjoining the La Touche Hotel, is a small building,
once a bank. The hotel itself closed in 2005, and is now, sadly,
derelict. Opened in 1894 as the Grand Hotel, its many notable
visitors over the years included Michael Collins (1890-1922),
who arrived here late on an October evening in 1921. At 5.30
next morning Collins walked from the hotel to nearby Holy
Rosary Church, where he received Holy Communion from Fr
Ignatius CP, who was currently leading a mission in the parish.
On parting, the priest gave him a prayer book with a crucifix
inside, and Collins asked him to ‘say the Mass for Ireland’. He
crossed to London an hour or so later as one of the Irish
th
delegation to the talks due to begin on 11 October 1921 and
which ended nearly two months later with the signing of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Collins was a regular visitor to Greystones: during De
Valera’s frequent absences during the War of Independence, he
used to check on the welfare of Sinead and the De Valera family,
then living at Craig Liath (now Edenmore) on Kinlen Road.
Another link was his aunt, Maisie Touhig O’Brien, who lived at
Dysart, on Kimberley Road.

Marine Terrace, the short road running down from Trafalgar
Road towards the sea, is dominated on the right-hand side of the
road by the Garda Station. Built as a coastguard station in about
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