Collins Barracks

@Rory W wrote:

Staying off topic for a mo – At one stage The Royal Hospital was considered as a site for UCD.

However Michael Tierney amongst others decided that Belfield was the best place for a ‘Catholic Arc of influence’ – St Vincent’s Hopital, UCD Belfield and Milltown to counteract the Protestant sphere of influence in the city centre. So the days of UCD staying in the city were numbered anyway.

When was that, Rory? I knew that the RHK had been mooted as a site for the Dail, but I’ve never heard about it as a potential site for UCD.

In my first post above, I was referring to the possibility of the Dail moving to RHK and UCD staying in the city centre, with Leinster House becoming the home of the NUI and UCD staying in its various buildings around the city, with a possible greater concentration of college activity around Earlsfort Terrace. As noted by Frank McDonald in The Destruction of Dublin, a group called Tuairim produced a pamphlet in the early 1960s arguing for the retention of UCD in the city for the good of the city- had UCD stayed in the Terrace, there would have been an ‘academic axis’ stretching from TCD to UCD via the NLI, NGI, NUI and other museums / institutions.

You’re certainly right about the Tierney fear of ‘The Protestants’, but UCD in RHK? Any leads greatly appreciated.

@PTB wrote:

I’ve encountered the same problem, even though I was with a group of architects who clearly wanted to see the Chapel and who would have been greatly privleged to see the cuilding. Honestly, how hard can it be to open the place every morning and close it again in the evening?

Here we have it; really the finest surviving 17th century building in Ireland, one of the finest buildings in Ireland, period, with the best and one of the most extensive works of wood carving from the 17th and 18th centuries, which stands comparison to anything in Britain from the same time, a criteria rarely fulfilled. Besides that, an extremely beautiful and important set of set of historic interiors;

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The other suite of unique historic rooms was destroyed by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in order to showcase their compositions of triangles and squares as well as other geometric shapes.

So while half of the Royal Hospital (the wrecked half) is open, all year round as a public museum, the other half, of huge interest, is generally locked up, closed from the public, not only when the rooms are in private use, but also during the time in between.

It is outrageous that these gimmicky corporate conferences and shows are permitted here, with the literally hundreds of far more suitable arenas availible in Dublin, including dozens of purposely built conference centers- but to keep these national treasures closed to the public, while they are actually located in a public museum, is beyond the pale.

Aren’t these still in State Ownership? Is the OPW actually so broke they need to whore out these national monuments for revenue?