Down on the shore along one arm of Kinsale’s sheltering harbour, the area known as Scilly was once a sleepy ramble of fishermen’s houses. A coastal path brings walkers from the Spaniard to the Bulman pubs. Between these lay the Spinnaker, a legendary restaurant run by the late singer and actor Hedli Anderson, who was married to poet Louis MacNeice for 17 years until 1959, and kitted out like the interior of a boat. Besides this, the Harbour Bar is an improbably tiny spot from which beer was sold in bottles, and owner Tim Platt, who died in 2024, would drop people in need of a lift home, leaving whoever happened to be there to mind the place for the duration of his absence.
But, to echo Ernest Hemingway’s famous saying about bankruptcy, Kinsale changed gradually, and then suddenly. The Spinnaker was sold, to be demolished and replaced with, what the Irish Examiner described in 2017, as “a super-large new-build”, which today sits alongside a collection of vast glass and concrete boxes that loom along the headland. Now, the Harbour Bar is also for sale, and a group of locals have come together to see if they can save a small part of this once-charming pocket of west Cork.
With a price tag of €1.5 million, plus €900,000 for the parking spot beside it, billed by agents Brendan Bowe as a “site”, it’s a tall order.
“I decided to post on the Kinsale Noticeboard Facebook group out of a sense of combined desperation and hope,” says Lynn Harding, whose Not So Scilly group is aiming to raise funds to buy the bar and run it as a community pub.
“I knew the most likely outcome would be private purchase by a millionaire, and the loss of a much-beloved part of true Kinsale,” she says.
“The past five years since Covid have brought a new and very different wave of international investor,” says fellow local organiser, Gráinne O’Keeffe. While some buyers are hedging their bets since Brexit, others are Americans for whom an English-speaking country in the Eurozone doubtless holds appeal.
“With largely absent owners, this phenomenon benefits a few initially, but soon turns a locale into ‘Monaco’,” O’Keeffe continues. “Attractive only for the part-time super-wealthy, locked up for much of the year and devoid of community, as the regular providers of goods and services are pushed out.”
On March 20th Harding put a potentially whimsical post on Kinsale’s Facebook page, saying “Proposal: 1,500 of us chip in €1,000 each and rename it Tim’s.” The results astonished her.
“I didn’t expect people to respond the way they did. People nowadays are so overwhelmed, we almost feel there’s no point in trying to stem the raging tide of change and challenge.” With close to a hundred sign-ups overnight, Harding is registering a company to formally receive pledges.
Harding and O’Keefe are keen to point out that the project has openness at its heart.
“Kinsale has been very fortunate to date to have had a diverse inward flow of people who have settled here,” says O’Keeffe.
“I want everyone who comes here to feel welcome and to fall in love with our town,” agrees Harding. “At the same time, there’s somewhat of a formula to what makes a place like Kinsale special: rich legacy, storied architecture, bottomless history, independent businesses; so it’s important to try to preserve that. I’m not talking about freezing everything in the past and preventing progress.”
Local pubs have a unique role in this, as time capsules of nights out, parties, conversations, stories and community. There are examples of successful community pubs across the UK, including the Blue Bell in Norfolk. Established in 1795, the pub has been community-owned and run since 2021, facilitated by the villagers being able to have it listed as an “asset of community value”.
In Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, 13 customers took over the licence of Haughton’s by setting up a committee with shareholders. Meanwhile, in Kerry, a successful Go Fund Me campaign has brought the community ownership of the Inny Tavern (Tábhairne na hÚine) in Dromid a step closer to reality. Eimear Ní Mhurchú of Forbairt na Dromoda Teo says: “People have to do what they can while there’s still a possibility of doing something. If we don’t stand up for what matters to us, it will be our fault when it’s gone.”
However, there is another set of pressures in Kinsale.
In 2021, American Thomas Quick bought Raffeen House from Cully & Sully co-founder, Colum O’Sullivan, for €4.75 million. In 2023, Nike heir Travis Knight reportedly paid €4.5 million for Ocean Breeze in Scilly.
In the same year, US billionaire James Berwind bought Sprayfield House in Sandycove, Kinsale, for €4.75 million. Sprayfield was built in 1770 and Berwind has largely demolished it as part of his renovations. He also bought Seaspray in Scilly for a reported €5.5 million and Valley House for €4.99 million.
Not all of the houses are demolished for rebuilds, but many properties nonetheless remain empty for long periods.
“I don’t understand why anyone would visit a place, love it, and then want to change everything about it,” says Harding. “It’s like seeing a cake shop and thinking, ‘wow, what a delicious spread’; then going in and replacing all the cakes with concrete. It would be such a shame to lose the Harbour Bar, the last public amenity on the Lower Road.”
Kinsale, for all its timeless charm, has a legacy of being accommodating to contemporary architecture, and the current problems are less of style than of scale, induced by almost unimaginably disproportionate levels of wealth, which brings sensibilities that are out of kilter with their new neighbourhoods.
Robin Walker’s 1963 O’Flaherty House, Kinsale’s original, and justly celebrated modernist box, was built into the sloping shoreline further along the Scilly headland. Visible only from the water, it now appears utterly dwarfed and diminished.
“At minimum, we hope to be competitive in trying to purchase it,” says O’Keeffe.
“We’d love to host everything,” adds Harding. “From open-mic nights, to poetry readings, dementia-friendly events, craft circles, games nights. We want to make sure that everyone, from the people who’ve lived here all their lives, to people who are only getting to know Kinsale now, or those who move here in the future, is able to experience the magic that makes us love the town so much.”
