Hughes’s Avenue (Ballybough)

Previously called Carey’s Lane, this street off Ballybough Road, near Ballybough Bridge, was renamed because of the hostility that the name ‘Carey’ attracted from being borne by the notorious informer James Carey, one of the Invincibles. (The name had no link with Carey himself.)

James Carey (1845–1883) was a Dublin-born builder and leading Fenian who became involved with the Invincibles. He played a key role in the Phoenix Park Murders in 1882, but after his arrest in 1883 he turned informer, and his evidence led to the conviction and execution of five of his fellow conspirators.¹

Carey was elected to the Corporation as councillor for the Trinity Ward on 25 November 1882, but was removed from his position as a City Councillor by his fellow elected members on 5 March 1883.²

Following the trial, Carey sailed for South Africa under a pseudonym, but was shot by Patrick O’Donnell, another Fenian.

In October 1883, Mrs Hughes, who owned several properties on the street, wrote to the Corporation asking them to allow her change the name, reporting that ‘My tenants have recently subjected me to a great deal of annoyance on account of not having another name substituted for the now odious one of ‘Carey’.³

She explained that a new name plate with the name ‘Carey’s Lane’ had been erected by order of the Corporation on one of her houses, and that she had painted and dashed the house.

However, the tenants in the lane had ‘by throwing mud and dirt at the board, have completely effaced the name, and considerably injured my house’. Furthermore, four of the cottages were vacant, the former tenants refusing ‘to live in a locality bearing such a name’.

The Councillors, who had voted to eject their fellow-councillor Carey from his seat on the Corporation, agreed.

1. James Quinn, ‘Carey, James’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.001470.v1)
2. ‘Town Councillor Carey’, in Dublin Evening Mail, 5 March 1883, p. 3.
3. Reports 1884/179.