27/05/2026
WEEK FOUR - 18th June 2026
Continuing with extracts from the Club History, White Sails Crowding, we take a look at our beautiful club-house as the week of 195th anniversary celebrations gets underway. The Royal Irish is privileged to have the oldest purpose-built yacht club-house in the world, a classical and elegant building of distinction, dating from 1851, designed by the eminent architect John Skipton Mulvany (1813-1870).
Although the Admiralty in London granted a site and permission to the Royal Irish to build a club-house in October 1846, a year of obstruction by the Commissioners of the Board of Public Works meant it was December 1847 before the Vice-Commodore, Pentheny P. O’Kelly, could raise the Club burgee over the site and works begin.
On 8 April 1851, the club-house with its fine entrance portico enclosed in a colonnade of eight Ionic columns was declared open. Today, the beautiful and welcoming entrance hall is virtually unchanged, perfectly symmetrical and lit by a domed skylight ten feet in diameter which incorporates a symbolical compass rose. The interior layout upstairs has remained largely unchanged, a tribute to Mulvany’s skill. The corridors leading from the hall are lit by four smaller round skylights and their barrel-vaulted ceilings echo the curved dome in the hall and Mulvany cleverly exploited natural light throughout the interior of the whole building. The principal rooms enjoy a fine view of the marina and harbour, with the Club situated directly facing the wide entrance between the East and West Piers. The Billiard Room is an important part of the Club heritage being one of the few surviving purpose-built nineteenth-century billiard-rooms in Ireland.
Tomorrow, the magnificent Drawing Room, most recently redecorated in 2023, will host the Classic Regatta Reception. Members might enjoy looking afresh at the three beautiful and historical window pelmets and the superb chandeliers. The restoration of the pelmets was the great surprise and joy of the conservation work in 2023. They had been painted over with a thick brown paint an unknown number of years before. This paint was removed by the expert conservators, revealing the original exquisite pelmets which were then overlaid with individual sheets of delicate gold leaf, restoring them to their former glory, and allowing the intricate detail of the Club’s crest surmounted by a magnificent crown to be seen for the first time in many years. The brilliant chandeliers were installed in 1986 thanks to a most generous bequest by Peter Odlum.
Since Mulvany’s day, the Dining Room has seen two rooms opened to each other to make the notably elegant and comfortable room we know today. At the Regatta Gala Supper on Saturday we will see the antique tables set with shining silver cutlery and glasses, and decorated with candles and flowers. There are few more beautiful rooms in Dublin.
The greatest change to the Royal Irish club-house since 1851 can be seen in the downstairs floor where the Changing Rooms and Wet Bar are located, and in the extensions to the East and West Decks. Much of this work stems from the ambitious and successful RIYC 2000 project which saw the Club making the major investment that continues to benefit the Club today.
The relocation of the Boathouse to the West End of the Deck opened up the opportunity for redevelopment and expansion. Then Commodore Denis Woods drove the vision of upgrading the Wet Bar, working with future Commodores, the architect James Horan and Paddy McSwiney. As the club-house is a protected structure, a sympathetic approach was essential. The award-winning architectural design reimagined a space which resembled the inside of the hull of a boat. The existing windows became portholes, and lighting and cabling were concealed behind the oak hull. The beautiful brick vault ceilings and stone walls were cleaned. The old semi-circular bar counter from the members’ bar was installed in the wet bar and painted. The Library was renovated, and the granite columns are all that remain of the original Boathouse.
The RIYC 2000 project transformed the use of the Wet Bar and expanded the range of activities. Curved sliding doors added later allowed the space to be partitioned as needed. Dance classes, for example, can take part in one section, while the Cadets gather for instruction in another. Large and small functions can now be accommodated, and the Club now offers both the formality of the Dining Room and the informality of the Wet Bar to members and their guests.
Next week as the Club Regatta gets underway we will move from the shore onto the water to look at regattas and races over the years and the great achievements of Royal Irish sailors.
WEEK THREE - 11th June 2026
With fingers crossed for good weather for the Classics Regatta on 20 and 21 June and the Club Regatta on 27 June, members might like to take a fresh look at the painting of the Club’s 1873 Regatta which hangs in the Drawing Room. The finest painting in the Club’s collection – Yachts Racing for the Royal Irish Yacht Club (1873) in a Strong Sea by Richard Brydges Beechey – depicts the eight competing boats just off the Muglins, looking northwards to Howth in the distance. It was the first leg of a race of mixed handicapped fleet of cutters and schooners. The race most likely started from an anchored line inside the harbour, with mainsails hoisted, given that flying starts were still experimental at this date. A stiff southerly wind is blowing so all the cutters have reduced sail and their retractable top masts have been ‘sent down’, while the schooners are carrying small triangular mainsails.
As well as the original painting, the Club has two lithographs of the work, one coloured and hanging in the Members’ Bar, and a sepia version in the Bar, which provide the key to what is happening in the race. The largest cutter Garrion (98 tons) is in the lead, closely followed by the largest schooners Gwendolyn (84 tons) and Pantomime (140 tons). Arethusa in the foreground is fourth, while Fiona in fifth place is tacking for the mark. The last three boats are Iona, Flying Cloud and Oimara.
Hal Sisk and Iain McAllister have a lively account of an eventful race in variable conditions:
“Pantomime’s bobstay took a chunk out of Oimara's counter at the start. Garrion's mainsail separated from its luff rope, and Gwendolyn later broke off her bowsprit at the stem after a second collision with Oimara’s counter. Such accidents were commonplace and were mentioned casually in the race report without comment or attribution of blame.
After the fleet rounded the Rosbeg, the wind dropped near the South Bull and it became a drifting match for a while, before the wind rose again allowing a second round to be completed. Astonishingly in a modern context, there were no protests, and despite her early collision, Pantomime was declared the winner.”
Pantomime had the best racing record of the schooners in Britain and Ireland in the 1873 season with eight first prizes and five second. Almost all the yachts in the race are visiting from England and Scotland, with the exception of Flying Cloud, owned by the splendidly named Baget Blood, Esq., of Dublin. All were sailed by professional crews for their owners, who were relatively few in number, given the high cost of maintaining a large professional crew and the difficulty of getting from one regatta to another.
During the 1873 season, the twenty-two Royal Yacht Clubs of Britain and Ireland organised 155 races, of which seventy-nine or just over half were in Ireland and Scotland. As Hal Sisk observes, ‘the yacht clubs in the Irish Sea and North Channel represented a major counterweight to the English yachting scene. While there were more yachts and clubs in the South of England, the sport of yachting was to a great extent shaped and popularised in the Irish Sea.
Richard Brydges Beechey (1808-1895) was an artist, naval officer, and marine surveyor who lived for many years at 2 Belgrave Square in Monkstown. He took part in the 1824
Blockade of Algiers, and on HMS Blossom spent three years in the Pacific between 1825 and 1828 surveying the Pacific Islands and the coasts of California and China. Beechey painted a number of lighthouses and light ships around the Irish coast, characteristically under rough conditions, and he portrayed yacht races, such as that of the Royal Irish Regatta, in great detail recording accurately the rigging and other details of the competing craft against translucent wave effects.
WEEK TWO - 4th June 2026
With the growth of the sport of yachting in British and Irish waters in the 1820s, as we saw last week, yacht clubs began to be established. The Royal Thames Yacht Club had been founded in 1775 and the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1815. The Royal Northern & Clyde Yacht Club was founded in 1824, soon followed by other Royal Clubs in Singapore, Plymouth, Gibraltar and Stockholm.
In Dublin meanwhile, shipping and yachting had been transformed by the development of the great ‘Asylum’ harbour from 1817 at the old fishing village of Dunleary, renamed Kingstown in 1821 to mark the visit of King William IV. Before the harbour was built, yachts lay in the Liffey and the Dodder rivers, and at the end of a day's sailing in the bay, their crews often had to beat upriver against the tide, a laborious and tiring endeavour.
The port of Dublin had been difficult to access except at high tide due to a sandbar across the mouth of the Liffey. Sudden storms were common, and with no shelter in Dublin Bay, there were hundreds of shipwrecks over the centuries. As Captain Charles Malcolm of George IV’s Royal Yacht observed:
The Bay of Dublin has perhaps been more fatal to seamen and ships than any in the world, for a ship once caught in it in a gale of wind from ENE to SSE must ride it out at anchor or go on shore, and from the nature of that shore the whole of the crews almost invariably have perished.
The dangers of the coast and the need for a secure harbour came tragically to widespread public attention in November 1807 when two troopships, the Prince of Wales and the Rochdale, were wrecked in gale force winds and heavy snow off Blackrock and Seapoint. Dubliners were shocked to see 400 bodies washed ashore on the city's coastline and officialdom was finally spurred into action.
The Dublin-based shipbroker Richard Toutcher began a one-man campaign to have a pier built near Dunleary to provide shelter to shipping in storms. His campaign led to the passing of an Act of Parliament in 1815 when eight harbour commissioners were appointed to supervise the building of a new harbour designed by the Scottish architect, John Rennie. Work began on the East Pier in 1817 and by 1821 both East and West Piers had been constructed from granite mined in Dalkey, although the pierheads with their lighthouses were not completed until 1840.
On 15 September 1831, a group of keen yachtsmen met at the Gresham Hotel to discuss the founding of a yacht club and prepare rules. Five days later, a second meeting adopted the name of ‘The Royal Irish Yacht Club’. The Marquess of Anglesey agreed to be the first Commodore, and Colonel Owen Lloyd was the first Secretary. Saunder’s News-Letter of 26 September announced that the ‘greater number of leading Irish yachtsmen had joined the Club’. The Iron Duke himself, the Duke of Wellington, was an early member, as were the
Earl of Belfast, owner of the famous 162-ton racing cutter, Louisa, his father, the Marquess of Donegall, and their kinsman Lord Chichester, the great advocate for the abolition of slavery and Chief Secretary of Ireland. An entrance fee of five guineas was charged, with an annual subscription of three guineas. By 1833 the Royal Irish had 254 members including the whiskey magnates James and John Jameson, George III’s son, the Duke of Sussex, and Colonel John Madden of Hilton Park, Co. Monaghan, the prominent landowner and enthusiastic yachtsman who owned the 69-ton cutter Ganymede.
On 17 October 1831, the Admiralty in London granted the Royal Irish permission to fly the White Ensign. The Club therefore became the third yacht club to obtain an Admiralty warrant, and the only the second (after the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1829) to be permitted the White Ensign.
As we shall see next week, the Committee now began to plan the Royal Irish’s first regatta with the dates 25-29 June 1832 fixed, and a general subscription list to provide funds opened among ‘the citizens of Dublin, the officers of the garrison and the ladies.’
Peter Boylan and Jane Mahony.
WEEK ONE - 28th May 2026
As we look forward to the Royal Irish Yacht Club’s 195th anniversary week, with the Classic Regatta on 20 and 21 June and the Club regatta on 27 June, our Club History White Sails Crowding tells the story of the first ever regatta in Dublin Bay in 1828 which led on to the founding of the RIYC three years later.
Recreational sailing had all but disappeared from Irish and British waters in the years of blockade and danger during the Napoleonic Wars. It was only after the decisive defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that the sport of sailing was able to grow and organise formally. The Ports of Dartmouth and Plymouth held regattas in 1822 and 1823 and the Royal Yacht Squadron launched the first Cowes Week in 1826.
In Dublin, the appointment in 1828 of Lord Anglesey, Waterloo hero and keen sailor, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was the spur to renewed sailing activity in the bay. Despite losing his leg at Waterloo, Anglesey was a renowned sailor and proud owner of the fastest super-yacht of the day, the 68 foot, 113-ton cutter Pearl. Anglesey had looked for the builder of the fastest boats in Britain, and found him in Philip Sainty of Essex. The problem was that Sainty was in jail. He had been caught out both building fast Revenue cutters and fruit schooners to catch smugglers, while simultaneously building even faster, more manoeuvrable vessels for the smugglers themselves to outrun the official craft. Pearl was Sainty’s ‘Get out of Jail’ card.
On 22 July 1828, Anglesey inaugurated the first regatta in the newly-constructed Kingstown Harbour, anchoring Pearl as a spectator vessel at the finish line. Huge crowds turned out to watch the racing in excellent conditions of sun and wind, before a heavy afternoon downpour drove them to the shelter of the tents and booths set up along the foreshore. The Earl of Elgin’s Liberty won the Fifty Guinea Cup and such was the success of the event that another regatta was held in 1829, with even larger crowds of enthusiastic spectators.
There was no regatta in 1830 due to the death of George IV, but yachting was now firmly established in Dublin Bay. The next step was surely the establishment of a yacht club.
Jane Mahony
White Sails Crowding: A History of the Royal Irish Yacht Club will be available at the special discount price of €25 for the month of June to mark the Club’s 195th Anniversary.
Contact the Catering Office to purchase.