Georgian Dublin - Georgian Dublin Today

Georgian Dublin Today

In the years after independence in 1922, independent Ireland had little sympathy for Georgian Dublin, seeing it as a symbol of British rule and of the unionist identity that was alien to Irish identity. By that stage, many of the gentry who had lived in them had moved elsewhere; some to the wealthy Victorian suburbs of Rathmines and Rathgar, Killiney and Ballsbridge, where Victorian residences were built on larger plots of land, allowing for gardens, rather that the lack of space of the Georgian eras. Those that had not moved in many cases had by the early twentieth century sold their mansions in Dublin. The abolition of the Dublin Castle administration and the Lord Lieutenant in 1922 saw an end to Dublin's traditional "Social Season" or masked balls, drawing rooms and court functions in the Castle. Many of the aristocratic families lost their heirs in the First World War, their homes in the country to IRA burnings (during the Irish War of Independence) and their townhouses to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Daisy, the Countess of Fingall, in her regularly republished memoirs Seventy Years Young, wrote in the 1920s of the disappearance of that world and of her change from a big townhouse in Dublin, full of servants to a small flat with one maid. By the 1920s and certainly by the 1930s, many of the previous homes in Merrion Square had become business addresses of companies, with only Fitzwilliam Square of all the five squares having any residents at all. (Curiously, in the 1990s, new wealthy businessmen such as Sir Tony O'Reilly and Dermot Desmond began returning to live in former offices they had bought and converted back into homes.) By the 1930s, plans were discussed in Éamon de Valera's government to demolish all of Merrion Square, perhaps the most intact of the five squares, on the basis that the houses were "old fashioned" and "un-national". They were only saved by Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 and a general lack of capital and investment; the plans were put on hold in 1939 and forgotten about by 1945.

Though that did not stop the destruction of some of Georgian Dublin. Dublin's most perfectly planned square, Mountjoy Square, was under serious threat with almost all of the south side demolished by property speculators during the 1960s and 70s; even so, buildings with facsimile facades were subsequently built in place, re-completing the square's uniform external appearance as it stands today. The world's longest row of Georgian houses, running from the corner of Merrion Square down to Lesson Street Bridge, was sliced in two by the decision of the Irish government in the early 1960s to demolish part of the row and replace them by a modern office block.

By the 1990s, attitudes had changed dramatically. Strict new planning guidelines sought to protect the remaining Georgian buildings, though some property owners still found their way around the restrictions. A surprising number of old houses in poor repair, if an owner wished to demolish them but had been refused planning permission, just happened mysteriously to go on fire and be burnt to the ground, facilitating 'development'. However, in contrast with the lax development controls applied in Ireland for many decades, by the 1990s a whole new mindset among politicians, planners and the leaders of Dublin City Council (formerly Dublin Corporation) produced a determination to preserve as much as possible of the remaining Georgian buildings, with prosecutions for unauthorised developments becoming more regular (see An Bord Pleanála and An Taisce). However there are once again renewed fears for areas such as James' Street and Thomas Street, with a church on Jones's Road illegally demolished in 2008. Further, with the consent of Dublin City Council, illuminated advertising billboards are currently being erected on Parnell Square. The war to preserve Georgian Dublin has not yet been won.

Perhaps the biggest irony for some is that residence that marked the move of the aristocrats from the northside to the southside (where the wealthier Dubliners have remained to this day), and that in some ways embodied Georgian Dublin, Leinster House, home of the Duke of Leinster, ended up as the parliament of independent republican Ireland; but his family also produced the republican leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The decision in the late 1950s to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Kildare Place and replace them with a brick wall was greeted with jubilation by a republican minister at the time, Kevin Boland, who said they stood for everything he opposed. He described members of the fledgling Irish Georgian Society, newly formed to seek to protect Georgian buildings, of being "belted earls". The Society also restored the "Tailors' Hall" in Back Lane in the 1960s, which had been the venue for the republican convention in 1792; it was helped by members of Sinn Féin led by Maire Comerford whose republicanism was even more pronounced than Boland's.