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The Red Bank Restaurant –‘Irish Nazi watering hole’

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The Red Bank Restaurant (19-20 D’Olier Street) was one of the city’s most famous and long-running restaurants, open from 1845 – 1969.

Culinary historian Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire wrote that it was:

…established by Burton Bindon on the site of a famous city hostelry (and) known originally as ‘Burton Bindon’s’. (It) took its current name from the famous ‘Red Bank’ oysters which grew on beds owned by Bindon in Co. Clare and were available in season in his Dublin establishment [1]

Taken over by the Montgomery family at the turn of the century, by 1934 it boasted a ground floor with a grill room and luncheon bar, two further floors of dining rooms and some of the best food in the city.

Sadly, it perhaps best known for being a popular meeting place for pro-axis supporters. American historian R. M. Douglas described it as a ‘well known haunt of ultra-nationalist and extremist bodies owned by a German-born member of the Dublin Nazi Party’. [2]

It was a regular meeting place before the war of Adolph Mahr’s ‘German Association’. Mahr had been a leading Nazi official in Dublin, and also the Director of the Irish National Museum. The ‘German Association’ would often invite sympathetic Irish men to these dinners where the table was draped with a Swastika flag.

Red Bank. The Irish Press (Apr 22, 1939)

The Irish Press (Apr 22, 1939)

In February 1940, 1916 Rising veteran and long-serving fascist organiser WJ Brennan-Whitmore invited a select group of ‘Celtic Confederation of Occupational Guilds’ (CCOG) veterans, most of whom he had known from his Blueshirt days, to the Red Bank restaurant to sound them out for a new group called ‘Clann na Saoirse’ (‘Tribe of Freedom’). [3]

In May 1940, the ‘Irish Friends of Germany’ (aka the National Club) held a meeting in the restaurant that was attended by 50 people. George Griffin, veteran anti-Semite and ex Blueshirt, spoke on the subject of the ‘The Jewish Stranglehold on Ireland’. Griffin mentioned many Jews by name and went onto advocate that ‘… we should never pass a Jew on the street without openly insulting him’. [4]

In 1942, the restaurant was host to a number of meeting from the ‘Aontacht na gCeilteach’ (Pan Celtic Union), a front group for ‘Ailtri na hAiseirghe’ (‘Architects of the Resurrection’). [5]

Images from Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire's ‘The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History'

Images from Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire’s ‘The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History’

As aforementioned, RM Douglas is of the opinion that the restaurant was owned by a German Nazi party member. Historian Gerry Mullins (author of Dublin’s Nazi No. 1) supports this theory and names the Schubert family as owning the restaurant.

However, respected culinary historian Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire has said that he has ‘found no evidence of the Red Bank leaving the Montgomery family ownership from the beginning of the twentieth century until its sale in the late 1960s’ and that the Mr Schubert referenced was actually the manager of the Solus factory in Bray. Mac Con Iomaire also seriously questions the claim by David O’Donoghue (author of ‘Hitler’s Irish Voices’) that newspaper advertisements for a new lounge in The Red Bank Restaurant were coded messages for Nazi meetings.

The standard of food at The Red Bank declined over the war years, when it became a late night drinking establishment. It closed in 1948 but was reopened under new management. A fire in 1961 gutted the place and the restaurant finally closed its doors in 1969.

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Notes:
[1] Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire, ‘The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History’ (DIT, 2009), 100
[2] RM Douglas, ‘Architects of the Resurrection: Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and the Fascist ‘New Order’ in Ireland’ (Manchester, 2009), 66
[3] ibid
[4] Martin White, The Greenshirts:Fascism in the Irish Free State 1935-45, (Queen Mary University of London, 2004), 245
[5] Douglas, 271


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