In North County Dublin you can find the picturesque seaside and fishing village called Skerries. When I was growing up this was a regular day trip for the family. Our favourite swimming place was the Captain’s. In the distant past the Captain’s was a swimming hole with diving boards which was part of the Red Island Holiday Resort. Feargal Quinn, the founder of Superquinn Supermarkets, grew up working in Red Island which was owned and run by his father.
In the years post WW2 holiday resorts became very popular. The appeal was that a family could pay a fixed fee and be served three good meals a day. All entertainment was on site. Skerries also benefited from being a train stop on the Dublin to Belfast railway line. Then the 1970’s came along and everyone wanted to travel to “the Continent” and drink cheap Spanish wine and get suntans. I remember when the choice of sunscreen was factor 2, or factor 4. The Red Island Resort was an early casualty of the move away from domestic holiday resorts.
We never stayed in Red Island, but I do remember it well. As the infrastructre was dismantled it was replaced by public park facilities, car parking and playgrounds. You can see my family in Skerries in this photograph from the 1960’s.
In the centre of Skerries Village, in a prominent position sits the Hamilton Monument. This is a scale replica of the Wellington Monument. James Hans Hamilton was a landlord who represented the area in the Westminster Parliament in the 19th Century. After his death in 1863 the monument was constructed and was completed in 1865.
The Hamilton family were responsible for much of the planning of Skerries town. Whether he represented the interests of his tenants in Westminster is open to debate. These were the days before secret ballots, when voters were called out by name to cast their vote. Landlords would set up a beer tent on election day, and after each tenant loudly cast his vote for his landlord the agent would slip him some money. Westminster was a parliament which worked to protect the status quo for landlords, not to reform it for tenants. Irish tenants were victims of the worst conditions to be found anywhere in the British Empire, a hangover from the Penal Laws.
The inscription on the monument reads:
This Monument was erected in memory of James Hans Hamilton Esq. M.P. Abbotstown House, Co. Dublin by the tenantry of his severel estates viz.: Holmpatrick, Dublin, Meath, Carlow, Down and Queens County in testimony of their esteem for him as a kind friend and benevolent landlord. He represented this County in Parliament for twenty-two years and died 19th June 1863.
Pardon me if I throw up a little in my mouth, but I don’t believe that his tenants clubbed in to erect a monument for their landlord. They paid for it but neither intentionally nor voluntarily. By 1897 the Hamilton Family were elevated to the British Peerage becoming Lord Holmpatrick.
For me this obelisk is erected almost as a mirror of how the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh’s went about it. The father made provision for his name in posterity and the son completed the work, elevating his father to grander status. The Egyptians did it to secure a place in the afterlife, the Anglo-Irish landlord did it to secure a permanent bench in the House of Lords.
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