Dublin Castle (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 2-5pm,
tours every 15min; www.historic-centres.com ; £3/€3.81) is
just a short walk along Dame Street. Once inside the castle
precinct, you're confronted with a real pig's ear of architectural
styles: an ugly modern tax office stands to your left, an
over-precise Gothic fantasy of a church of 1803 adorns the ridge
straight ahead, and to your right is the worn red brick of the
castle itself.
The castle dates from King John's first Dublin court of 1207, so
it's a surprise to find that today it has the appearance of a
graceful eighteenth-century building, with only the massive stone
Record Tower giving the game away - although, in the
nineteenth century, this too was heavily rebuilt. Originally there
were four such towers - the base of the Bermingham Tower, to the
southwest, also survives - but the castle later became more of an
administrative than a military centre. After the Act of Union at
the beginning of the nineteenth century the castle continued as the
Viceroy's seat, and as the heart of British rule, the place stands
as a symbol of seven hundred years of British power in Ireland.
Sometimes the intended symbolism is subverted by Dublin humour:
the figure of Justice that stands at the top of the Bedford
Tower , on the northside of the yard, turns her back to the
city, illustrating, it was said, just how much justice Dubliners
could expect from the English. Furthermore, the scales she holds
used to tilt when it rained; to ensure even-handedness, the problem
was solved by drilling holes in the scale-pans.
The castle hosted the European Parliament in 1990, and massive
amounts of EU funds were spent on refurbishing it in honour of the
occasion. The State Apartments are now used by the president
to entertain foreign dignitaries (so at times they will be closed
to visitors). It's these, including the State Drawing Room
and the Throne Room , that you'll see on the official tour.
The grandeur of the furnishings takes a bit of adjusting to; for
instance, all the rooms have Donegal hand-tufted carpets mirroring
the eighteenth-century stucco-work, which although superb examples
of craftsmanship really are quite overpowering. This opulence must
always have been in stark contrast to the surrounding reality of
the city: the high wall that you'll notice at the end of the
castle's garden is said to have been built to shield the delicate
sensibilities of Queen Victoria from the appalling condition of the
slums on St Stephen Street.
Excavations for the new conference centre built in 1990 revealed
perhaps the most interesting part of the tour, the
Undercroft . Here you can see remains of an earlier Viking
fort, part of the original thirteenth-century moat plus the base of
the Powder Tower, a section of the old city wall and the steps that
used to lead down to the Liffey. It's unfortunate that similar care
for the city's past was not practised two blocks north of the
castle on Wood Quay , the site of Viking and Norman
settlements that yielded amazing quantities of archeological finds
(on show in the National Museum Annexe). The excavations were never
completed and there's undoubtedly more to be discovered on the
site, but despite a lot of argument the corporation of Dublin was
able to go ahead and put up two massive Civic Offices, known to one
and all as "The Bunkers", destroying what may have been the most
important early Viking archeological site in Europe.
The castle is also home to the Chester Beatty Library and
Gallery (May-Sept Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm;
Oct-April Tues-Fri 10am-5pm; www.cbl.ie ; free), created by
Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, an Irish-American mining magnate who
settled in Dublin in 1950 and gave his remarkable collection of
oriental art to the nation. Its superbly crafted objets
d'art range from Chinese rhino-horn cups to life-size Burmese
Buddhas, while the manuscripts include the oldest surviving
examples of Egyptian love poetry.
In front of the castle on Lord Edward Street is City
Hall (Mon-Sat 10am-5.15pm, Sun 2-5pm), one of the finest
examples of late Georgian architecture in the city. Built between
1769 and 1779 as a financial centre, the building's sumptuous
interior reflects the power and prestige felt by eighteenth-century
Dublin's merchant class. One of the most striking features of the
building is the exquisite plasterwork by stuccodore Charles Thorpe
which decorates the gently lit dome above the building's rotunda.
To the right of the entrance is an eighteen-foot-high statue of
Daniel O'Connell, created by John Hogan in 1843, where "the
Liberator" is represented in the classical oratorical pose he may
have adopted in 1800 when he made his first public speech in this
building.