Raheny Village

~ a personal view ~

Raheny Village is situated on the Howth Road out of Dublin City. Originally a small village, it got built up particularly in the sixties and seventies and today has a respectable population of xxx,xxx. Its Irish language name "R�th �anna" suggest that a man named "�anna" had some sort of settlement there way back but the name became anglicised to Raheny along the way. Of course, as things are now in Ireland, it could have been the other way around.
	Howth is normally translated in Irish as Beann �adair, where Beann means a headland. The genitive case Binn appears in the roadsign qualifying the word road. Because this is normally the form which appears, there is a belief out there that Binn is the nominative case, and it figures on the Dart trains as a destination "Binn �adair". Sloppy!
	The standard of Irish on road signs is generally appalling. There are frequently multiple Irish translations of the same name, spelling and grammar are frequently appalling and many of the signs are clearly makey uppey translations from the English - despite there possibly having been an original Irish name for the place or road in any event. The sign across shows a complete ignorance of the way direction and movement are dealt with in Irish. It purports to translate Saint Assams Road EAST but you are faced with a choice in Irish depending on whether any movement is involved and if so what its direction is relative to the compass point cited and the viewer. In Irish Oirthear means the East itself, though it could be qualified, as in Me�n Oirthear meaning Middle East. Soir is used when movement is towards the East and anoir when it is from the East. Thoir is the adjective denoting the eastern property of something else and is the word which should have been used here, giving B�thar Naomh Assaim, Thoir.
Raheny has three churches in close proximity in the centre of the village. The original Protestant church, in the middle of a graveyard, but of which only the wall remains, the former Roman Catholic church with the thrice crossed roof, which now functions as a community hall and credit union, and the current modern RC church, with its separate belltower (shown here), and which is, frequently, closed to the public for fear of vandalism. The three churches can be seen in the picture. The current Protestant church, built by Lord Ardilaun in 1889, is in the former Ardilaun estate, now St. Annes Park, and can be entered from the Howth Road, a little further towards town.
	Raheny boasts one supermarket. How super is a matter of conjecture. Originally one of the Williams chain of stores, it subsequently became a SuperValu franchise, run by the Crowe family, who have similar stores in the area. While convenient, with substantial free carparking, it suffers from a variety of problems. It is not quite big enough to offer the normal range of choice one expects from a supermarket. Its stocks seem to be determined by whatever is on offer [or leftover] at the main suppliers, Musgraves. It does not appear to offer a career path to top management in the Irish superstore sector, at least to judge from the attitudes of staff - all of whom are very nice people, but ...
The village used to boast two banks [AIB and BOI - the two major Irish Banks] but competition has hotted up from the building societies and the Trustee Savings Bank. The AIB building, one of the two purpose built Banks, held itself as out a major architectural innovation in its day.
	Bettyglen was built around 1973 on the grounds of old Bettyglen house. Rumour has it that it was previously the site of a pig farm but the aroma, if such there ever was, has long disappeared. Rumour also has it that it was owned by Pat Pat O'Connor, a solicitor and onetime election agent for C J Haughey, a former Irish Prime Minister. Bettyglen abutts the Old Shieling Hotel, and in 1975 the Hotel, then owned by Provo sympathiser Bill Fuller, was attempting to surreptitiously break in an exit through the estate. This proved counterproductive and begot a very active residents association which successfully repulsed the attack. In more recent times the Shieling has succeeded in getting permission for the construction of appartments in its grounds with an exit to the main road via Bettyglen. Plus ça change.
As well as general wheelie bins, and paper wheelie bins, there is still a place for the standard, stand alone, street litter-bin. The recently inctroduced Irish Language Act now requires a vast range of publicly provided services to be bilingual, but the street-litter bin is one of the features of the Irish landscape which seems to have been bilingual since time immemorial. Rubbish is rubbish in any language.
	In 2005 Raheny won the prize for Dublin City's finest village. This was due in no small measure to the years of work put in by local residents,businesses and public representatives in planning the village centre, which had become chaotic over years of higgeldy piggeldy development . The village was also frequently spoiled with accumulating rubbish. A very active residents' group assembled [once/twice] a week to tidy it up, including doing a bit of planting, and there is now some hope that local pride in its current appearance may deter visitors and inhabitants alike from spoiling it again.
	What appears almost a leafy rural walk is actually the entrance to Manor House School. This is a girls' secondary school run by an order of nuns with the unusual title "poor servants of the Mother of God". It started in [1960] with a limited number of students and which has now grown to [xxx]. It's development has paralleled, to some extent, the progress in achieving equal rights for women in Irish society. Honours maths for girls in the [Leaving Certificate] was only possible here in [1967] at which time the only text book available for the new maths curriculum was that produced by the Christian Brothers [for boys!] and this was available in an Irish language version only. So girls undertaking honours maths in that year were pioneers in more ways than one.
	This relatively innocuous looking building is the local G�rda Station [police]. It covers quite a varied area in terms of demography and income brackets and is quite a busy station. In common with other stations, the G�rda on the beat virtually vanished over the years, to be replaced by speeding squad cars on the main Howth Road, though there has been a slight reintroduction of the local bobby in recent times. Said bobby tends, however, to be mostly seen standing outside the Bank of Ireland deterring those who recently raided that bank from coming back for second helpings.
	Raheny has quite a wide range of services, including super and lessermarkets [5], cleaners (2), pubs (5), banks (4), hairdressers (2), barbers (2), butchers [2), chemists [3], solicitors [2], doctors [whacks], take-aways [x] [NOTE: check out Hillside, Edenvale and St. Annes and the Ceders]. Significantly, it had, up to recently, one of the few remaining independent local hardware stores in the city. These have been dying out as a result of competition from the larger specialised emporia, such as Woodies and Atlantic, and the penetration of a range of hardware items into the Department Stores, such as Dunnes and Tesco. For its size, Raheny Hardware carried a very wide range of stock and was an invaluable asset to the local community.
	Raheny village is a funny mixture of the old and the new. Considerable effort has been made to retain a pleasant and internally compatible fa�ade. This building is now a Thai Restaurant [which also caters for take-away]. It is located inthe middle of Main Street, except what was, and is still named, "Main Street" is not effectively the main street having been bypassed by the Howth Road and the changed focus of the village in the direction of town [not quite right].
	Hairdressing in Raheny has changed over the years. The longest and most stable emporium is Duffy's barbers, located over what is now Prescott's Cleaners. All the local dads and lads have experienced the long queues on Saturdays for more decades than anyone can now remember. At one stage there were three ladies hairdressers within a stone's throw of one another. I think this is now down to two, at least in the village centre. Razor's edge, beside SuperValu, has also been around a long time, though it has transmogrified a few times. Some good hairdressers left and took their client base with them. For many years it was a combined ladies hairdressers and a barber shop, but they have now given up on the men.
[Photo of Chemist]	[The Drug Scene --> --> the Chemist's saga. Market sharing.]
	[Funny mixture of old and new, but does blend in. Find out what these old ones were ?artisans ?school ?hall and cross refer to the crescent.]
Good site on Raheny

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