If you have walked through the urban confusion of the northside,
the open spaces of Phoenix Park , Dublin's playground -
which begins a few-minutes walk west of Collins Barracks - will
come as a welcome relief. The name is a corruption of the Irish
fionn uisce (or "clear water") as a fresh water stream flows
through its grounds. A series of pillars stand across the road and
suddenly you're surrounded by grand, clipped hedges and tended
flowerbeds in what is one of the largest city parks in the world -
it's more than twice the size of London's Hampstead Heath or New
York's Central Park. The park originated as priory lands, which
were seized after the Reformation in the seventeenth century and
made into a royal deer park. The Viceroy's Lodge - now Áras an
Uachtaráin , the president's residence - is here, as well as a
205-foot obelisk erected in 1817 in tribute to the Duke of
Wellington . Wellington was born in Dublin, but was less than
proud of his roots - when reminded that he was Irish by birth, the
Duke replied tersely "being born in a stable doesn't make one a
horse."
In the northwest corner of the park, near the Ashtown Gate exit,
is the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre , which incorporates the
recently restored Ashtown Castle (daily: April-May
9.30am-5.30pm; June-Sept 9.30am-5pm; £2/€2.54). Set in the stables
of what was the home of the Papal Nuncio, this is an interesting,
if uninspiring diversion. While the exhibits in the centre are a
little dull, there is a good video on the history of the park and
an interesting tour of the castle (a seventeenth-century tower
house), which had been concealed in Papal Nuncio's residence, the
top floor acting as a private chapel. It is from here that free
tours of Áras an Uachtaráin (President's Residence) leave on
Saturdays every hour between 10.30am and 4.30pm (come early in
summer as there are a limited number of places). The old duelling
grounds, or Fifteen Acres , are also to be found in the park
- now the venue for gaelic football, cricket, soccer and,
occasionally, polo - as well as a race course where a flea
market is held every Sunday from noon onwards. The quality of
what's available can vary tremendously, and there seems no way of
knowing what it will be like until the day.
The park was also the scene of two politically significant
murders in the late spring of 1882, when two officials of
the British parliament, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the chief
secretary, and T.H. Burke, the undersecretary, were killed by an
obscure organization known as "The Invincibles". At first it seemed
that the motivation for the crime - long-standing bitterness over
the landlord-and-tenant relationship in post-Famine Ireland - was
directly connected with the Anglo-Irish politician Charles Stewart
Parnell's ongoing agitation for reform on behalf of the Irish
tenancy
. It seemed to Parnell that he would have to withdraw from public
life due to the implication - however ill-founded - that he was
connected with these murders, but his obvious sincerity in
denouncing them, and the effect that the event had on British
policy regarding the tenancy issue, was in fact to make his
position in Ireland stronger than ever.
Phoenix Park also contains Dublin's zoo at the southeast
corner of the park (Mon-Sat 9.30am-6pm, Sun 11am-6pm; adults
£5.50/€6.98; buses #10, #25, #26), the second oldest in Europe - it
was opened in 1830. Its claim to fame used to be that this is where
the MGM lion was bred; the zoo now has a programme for breeding
endangered species for subsequent release into the wild.