Vacancy Watch: The site where Clontarf’s tragic Victorian mansion, Redcourt, once stood

In the early hours of 9 August 2007, a man walked into Raheny Garda Station and calmly announced that he had just beaten his friend “more or less” to death in Clontarf, according to a report in the Independent on his trial.

The man, Alan Walsh, of 43 Edenmore Park, Coolock, told gardaí he’d had more than a dozen cans, and got in an argument with Dermot Sheridan. After he’d beaten Sheridan, he’d set his body alight, Walsh said. 

Hurrying to the scene of the crime, gardaí swiftly verified the appalling truth behind the confession. The battered and burnt body of the victim was found, just as the suspect had described, within the smouldering shell of a derelict Victorian mansion in Clontarf known as Redcourt.

In October 2008, a jury found Walsh guilty of murdering Sheridan and sentenced him to life in prison, according to another report in the Independent.

This was not the first tragic incident associated with Redcourt. In a more superstitious era it might have been considered cursed. Its story reads like a cheap pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe, a century-long streak of tragedy and misfortune, ending the inferno touched off by Walsh.

For a century or thereabouts, Redcourt stood on its acre-and-a-half, a little back from what is now Seafield Road East, amid the suburban comfort of Clontarf. 

Today, Seafield Road East remains something of a millionaires’ row, albeit one that has swallowed up the vast green spaces of its Victorian ancestor. But of Redcourt itself, nothing remains beyond its curved and cracked stone gateposts, except for an unruly mass of vegetation.

Once home to fine living, lavish parties and horseback afternoons, its only permanent residents in recent years have been a furtive family of urban foxes.

On a recent weekday afternoon, digging equipment could be seen parked within the gates of the now vacant site. A narrow path had been cleared through the dense overgrowth, and the wrought-iron gates had been overlaid with new metal fencing, and securely padlocked.

The site is owned by several members of the Wexford-based Nolan family as well as half-owner Clontarf-based Robert Pigott, according to property records. 

The company Savona Limited, whose directors are Oliver Nolan and Joan Nolan, according to the most recent company records, has been trying to develop it for years.

Their 2021 application to build 131 build-to-rent apartments there was quashed by a High Court order, and a judge last April shot down Savona’s attempt to appeal that. 

That has sent attempts to develop the site back to An Coimisiún Pleanála as of September.

Beginnings

When it was built in the late 19th century, Redcourt would have jutted out from the landscape of the seaside suburb – still, then, a place of green fields and tree-shaded country walks – as a triumphant statement in redbrick.

As early as 1905, the house had already been marked by tragedy, as the younger George Tickell, son of the unionist politician, died at sea aged 32.

This left his widow Florence to rattle about in the mansion before she remarried in 1911 and moved to Scotland, presumably with her share of his mammoth £24,000 bequest.

After the Gwynn family, famed academics and sportspeople, had passed through its halls, the house came into the possession of the rising Catholic bourgeoisie, in the form of the Tallons. 

James Tallon, the family’s patriarch, had cashed in royally on the Free State’s early cinema boom. He was proprietor of Cork’s celebrated Pavilion Theatre, and chaired the board of The Capitol on Dublin’s Prince’s Street.

James’s son Charles, a bookseller at another family enterprise – Tallon’s Bookshop on Stephen’s Green – would not live to inherit the family’s riches.

At 21 years of age, Charles was killed on a dark night in August 1923, on the way home from the Baldoyle Races, as he guided his motorbike towards the gates of Redcourt. He collided with a horse-drawn ice-cream cart on Vernon Avenue, according to a report at the time in the Freeman’s Journal. 

Devastated by the loss of their beloved son – memorials to “Charlie” continued to appear in the newspapers on his anniversary for well over a decade after his death – the Tallons remained in-situ at Redcourt, where James died in 1946.

From the Tallons, the house and grounds passed into the hands of the Hardys. To this day, the family are fondly remembered in Clontarf, but their lengthy tenure at Redcourt was marked by tragedy as well.

Originally from Omeath, Co. Louth, the family had owned the Dublin House bar in their hometown, before setting up as publicans and high-end fishmongers in Dublin. 

The Hardys were, in many ways, an exemplary family among the rising commercial class: parents highly successful in business, with the next generation plugged neatly into the sporting and ecclesiastical life of the state.

Michael Hardy, named after his father, straddled both worlds. Twice a Leinster champion with the Louth Gaelic football team, he was ordained in 1949.

Fr. Michael’s brother Gerry Hardy, born in 1936, was a quintessential golden boy of Dublin’s suburban elite. Educated at Castleknock College, he excelled on the rugby field, winning the Leinster Senior Cup with Bective.

A popular figure within Irish rugby, he achieved the ultimate honour of an international cap in 1962, when he was selected at out-half for the Five Nations game against Scotland at Lansdowne Road.

Another milestone beckoned in 1963, with Gerry’s wedding to fiancée Patricia Hayes – an Aer Lingus “hostess”, in the parlance of the time – arranged for early November. In late October, Gerry returned to his native Omeath to pick up his baptismal certificate in preparation for the wedding.

It was at midnight on 26 October, as he made his way back to Dublin with a friend, that Gerry’s Hillman Estate collided head-on with another car near Gormanstown, Co. Meath.

Gerry was pulled from the wreckage with severe injuries, but died at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda the following morning. His friend Anthony Slattery was also among the victims of the crash.

Instead of celebrating his younger brother’s wedding, Fr. Michael Hardy was called upon to officiate at Gerry’s funeral at St. Gabriel’s Church in Clontarf – yards from Redcourt itself.

Patricia Hayes, robbed of a life with Gerry on the eve of their wedding, ultimately married Gerry’s brother Paddy instead.

Endings

By the mid-1970s, Gerry’s parents, Ellen and Michael, had both passed away at Redcourt (Ellen leaving a will of £500,000), and the house – as well as the family fish business, the famous Hanlons of Moore Street -- passed to Paddy and Patricia.

As the lean 1980s became the roaring 1990s, Paddy Hardy fought a lengthy battle with planning authorities for permission to build apartments on the Redcourt estate. 

In the summer of 1991, Paddy and Patricia’s son Michael, 25, went on holiday to the United States with a couple of friends. He dove into the sea off Newport, Rhode Island, and misjudging the depth of the water, struck rock and was killed. 

Redcourt’s reputation was now the stuff of record, as well as of legend. It was a legend that grew in the telling. 

Today, locals recounting Redcourt’s grim history often reference the 1986 killing of James Wall, stabbed as he chased a burglar from his home at nearby Dollymount Park; Wall’s body was briefly hidden in a disused shed on the grounds of Redcourt. 

Wall’s murderer subsequently took his own life in prison.

One-by-one, the Hardys of Redcourt began to pass from this world around the turn of the millennium, their legacies a testament to the family’s business acumen.

Patricia – mother of the tragic Michael – left €16m when she died in 2004.

The Celtic Tiger made Redcourt, above all else, a prime piece of undeveloped real estate at the heart of a deeply desirable seaside address.

In 2004, the house and remaining grounds sold for a northside record of €7.8 million. Mark Piggott’s initial plans to demolish the house were knocked back by An Bord Pleanála amid widespread local opposition, but by August 2007, any such plans were moot. 

Redcourt – along with its history, its myths, its legends, and perhaps even its curse – had gone up in flames.

Walsh and Sheridan had been drinking with some other men in St. Anne’s Park throughout that August day in 2007, according to reports from Walsh’s trial.

As the park closed for the evening, the men, knowing Redcourt to have been abandoned and boarded up for several years, forced their way into the kitchen of the house and continued to drink. 

In the blaze that ensued, three floors of the house collapsed. By the time its charred shell was deemed unsalvageable and torn from the landscape, the weeds had already begun to swallow any trace of warmth or life that may have lingered there.