Architect’s grand designs on going back to his roots

ALL roads lead to Rome, though a fair few also wind their way to rural Ireland, judging by the number of folk who move here. But it’s not so much blow-in as bloodline boomerang when it comes to Brian Hamilton, former OPW chief architect for Ireland’s south-east, who had the world at his feet yet chose to up sticks to the sticks.

Though not without a degree of trepidation; “rural Ireland in 1981 was not a very attractive place for someone moving from Dublin”, he recalls. “You go to Sydney, Berlin and New York — but who heads for Waterford?”

Perhaps an architect whose hankering for an old country house hid an equally strong homing instinct? For he never planned to end up living in the same county where his great-grandfather, Thomas O’Shea, was born in 1886, one day and many years earlier than he made his own debut.

O’Shea was a station porter, who became a station master. “It was a good job; the railways were the airlines of the day.” Not that he stood still, making tracks to join the British civil service in 1908 and having “quite a bit of a hand in the revolution; he was in Dublin Castle”. He went on to serve as a parliamentary secretary for Eamon de Valera, and then assistant secretary to Lemass.

Radical tendencies clearly run in the family, given Hamilton asked his future wife if she “wanted to join the revolution”, this time to prevent the demolition of Georgian Dublin. The protesters included Hamilton’s lifelong friends, Caroline and Michele, twin daughters of Michael Sweetman, the bright light of Fine Gael who perished in the London air crash in 1972.

“We had barricades,” Hamilton recalls. “Mary Robinson came and supported us. They went after Hume Street but we held firm and the government caved in.”

Sam Stephenson was their architect at the time. “Sam said: ‘If you can’t beat the protesters, you may as well marry them,’” Hamilton laughs, referring to the iconic architect’s subsequent marriage to Caroline.

Hamilton then “brought the revolution to the country”, by helping to establish the first nondenominational school outside Dublin — which was around the same time that the keen canoeist was in training to be part of Ireland’s team, after whitewater canoeing first became an Olympic event. “I wasn’t particularly good and came last in the group,” he says.

But the real silver lining was the way his love of water led him to this neck of the woods, canoeing past the historic Island House that was destined to become his home.

Because “from day one we were Thomastownians”. A deal that was sealed when Hamilton wandered into The Jerpoint Inn and found a newspaper on a stick. “I had never seen that before,” he laughs. “I was so impressed!”

For Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this architect’s love affair with his rural roots will last forever.