One night ended the fishing industry
The storm of 1911
The harbour at Greystones was built between 1885 and 1897 after decades of campaigning -- the fishing community needed somewhere to land their catch and shelter their boats from the Irish Sea. It worked, for a while. Then on a night in October 1911, a sudden storm drove into the harbour and wrecked the bulk of the fleet in a few hours. The fishing industry never recovered. Steam trawlers were already landing fish closer to the Dublin markets; the Greystones boats couldn't compete. The harbour that took fifteen years to build outlasted the industry it was built for by less than fifteen more.
The line that transformed the town
The railway and Brunel
The railway arrived in Greystones on 30 October 1855, opened by the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway. The route around Bray Head was a significant engineering challenge, accomplished in consultation with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The station was first called Greystones and Delgany, renamed Greystones in 1863. For 145 years, the line ran on diesel as far as Greystones. In 2000, the DART electrification was extended south from Bray, and Greystones became what it is now: a Dublin commuter suburb at the end of the wire.
Where Michael Collins proposed
The Grand Hotel
The Grand Hotel opened in 1894, a Victorian seaside hotel built to take advantage of the new railway. Thirty-eight bedrooms, a billiard room, salt baths, a ladies dining room. Peadar O Cearnaigh -- who wrote the words to the Irish national anthem -- worked in the billiard room. Michael Collins proposed to Kitty Kiernan here. The hotel changed its name to La Touche in 1959, closed in 2004, and has since been converted to apartments. The building is still there on Trafalgar Road.
Before there was a town
1795: a noted fishing place
The earliest written description of Greystones dates from 1795 and calls it a noted fishing place four miles beyond Bray. There was no village at that point -- the fishermen lived scattered in the hinterland, putting out from whatever shelter the grey rock outcrop afforded them. The grey rocks gave the town its name. Most of the harbour infrastructure came ninety years later, and the town proper came with the railway. The sea was here first, and the people followed the fish.