Tag Archives: Palace Bar

Dublin Highlights

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I was born and grew up in Dublin. I spend a lot of time travelling through Dublin and its environs. I live nearby, in the town of Bray just 20km down the coast. I have regularly posted on my Dublin adventures. Of late, I have noted some good posts from overseas travellers and locals alike (World in Your Eyes and Finding Your Feet). So I thought I might join in and post a few Dublin memories. Something of a greatest hits perhaps, or top ten tips type of thing.

5 Top Sights

The Liffey

Christchurch Cathedral

St Stephen’s Green

Phoenix Park

Grand Canal Docks

Dublin is a great city to walk round. Literally. My series Dublin’s Circular Roads describes a particular route. Another circle is provided by the two canals, the Royal to the North and the Grand on the south. Within their radius the city centre is divided into north and south sides by the River Liffey. It is the river that makes the city. Each bank is lined with quaysides from the estuary in Dublin Bay upriver to the western rail terminus, Heuston Station. The main buildngs to see are the Custom House and the Four Courts, both by Gandon and on the North Quays. The Ha’penny Bridge, a cast iron pedestran bridge spanning the river between Liffey St and Temple Bar is one of Dublin’s most iconic sights.

Christchurch is the more ancient of Dublin’s two cathedral’s. King Sitric Silkenbeard, overtaken with piety in his later years, established it in 1028. The Synod House to the west is joined to the Cathedral by an arched brdge, making it look like the main road passes through the ancient church. Wonderful.

Dublin can be heaven

With coffee at eleven

And a stroll in Stephen’s Green

(Dublin Saunter by Leo Maguire and sung by Noel Pucell)

St Stephen’s Green waits at the top of Grafton Street. In the seventeenth century it was a commonage on the outskirts of the city. It was walled in 1664 with access restricted to owners of adjacent properties until 1877 when Sir A E Guinness, Lord Ardilaun, put the park into public ownership. Entering through Fusiliers’ Arch, pathways flow around the ornamental lake. Young Dubliners and visitors lounge on the grass, taking time out from the big smoke. Meanwhile, on the western end of the city (just past Heuston) the Phoenix Park is a vast walled park housing the Zoo, the President and a herd of deer. 

The Grand Canal inscribes a sublime arc around Dublin’s south inner cty. It reaches the estuary at Grand Canal Docks where the modern highrise of Google Docks clashes appropriately with nineteenth century docklands. This area provides a fitting finale for my Dublin’s Circular Roads series.

5 Top Visits

Dublin Castle

Trinity College

National Gallery

Hugh Lane Gallery

Guinness Hopstore

Dublin Castle stands on the spot where Dublin began. In the ninth century Viking raiders landed at the confluence of the Liffey with its tributary the Poddle. On the shore of this dark pool they established the Danish settlement, taking its name from the Gaelic for the pool: Dubh Linn. The Norman invasion three centuries later led to the building of Dublin Castle by order of King John in 1202. For eight hundred years it was the centre of foreign power. After Independence the Castle was used for state occasions and became a major tourist attraction. There’s a garden on the site of the old Dubh Linn, near the Chester Beatty Library which holds a priceless treasure of Oriental manuscripts, art and artifacts.

Trinity College campus is an oasis in the swirling centre of the city. Founded in the reign of Elzabeth at the end of the 16th Century it has become one of the most prestigous colleges in the Enlish speaking world. It houses the Book of Kells and its Library by right holds every book published in Ireland and Britain. 

The National Gallery is one of a quartet of public buildings flanking Leinster House, Ireland’s Dail (Parliament). The National Museum and Library face Kildare St, while the Gallery and the Natural History Museum (or Dead Zoo) face Merrion Square. The Gallery came from the Great Exhibition of 1847 on Leinster Lawns, proposed by Railway developer, William Dargan. The collection features the best of Irish art including Lavery, Yeats, Burton, Orpen, and international greats including Vermeer, Turner, Caravaggio and Monet. An extensive portrait gallery features contemporary and period art. 

The Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square was founded as Dublin’s Metropolitan Gallery. It is named for Hugh Lane, a young collector who amassed a fine collection of Impressionst art. He died on the Lustania in 1915, not quite forty.

Arthur Guinness established his brewery in 1759. The clocks of Dublin have been stuck at a minute to six ever since. In our heads, at least. The St. James’s Gate Brewery lies in the Liberties to the southwest of the city. A visit to the Hopstore will give you the full story, followed by a creamy pint in the elevated splendour of the tenth story Gravity Bar.

Or, you could go to one of Dublin’s many pubs.

5 Top Pubs

Dublin is packed with great pubs. There is no definitive syle, they come in all shapes and sizes. The Victorian and late Edwardian are perhaps most typical. Many’s the blog and pubication that has given the top ten or twenty. It all depends. For what it’s worth, my favourite five are:

1. O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row, 2. Toner’s of Baggot Street, 3. The Palace in Fleet Street, 4. Grogan’s Castle Inn on Sth William St, 5. The Stag’s Head at Dame Court.

That’s maybe enough for one pub crawl, but there are many more. James Joyce’s Ulysses posed the riddle of the impossibility of crossing Dublin without passing a pub. It is easily solved, of course. Don’t pass any, just go in. If indeed you do pass the Stag’s Head, and you shouldn’t, it’s near enough the definitive old style Dublin pub. 

With all that drink, the only people to remain upstanding in Dubln are its statues. Dublin’s statues immortalise figures from fact and fiction

5 Top Statues

1. Molly Malone on Suffolk Street, 2. Phiil Lynott on Harry Street, 3. Oscar Wlde at Merrion Square, 4. James Joyce, 5. Patrick Kavanagh.

The statue of Molly Malone by Jeanne Rynhart dates from Dublin’s millennium celebrations in 1988. Molly steps from the air of a song to become flesh, or bronze at least.

In Dublin’s Fair City

Where the girls are so pretty

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone.

As she wheeled her wheelbarrow

Through streets broad and narrow

Crying cockles and mussels, 

Alive, alive-oh!

The song is of obscure provenance. A music-hall ballad of the 1880s it was attributed to Scottish songsmith, James Yorkston. It has become the anthem for the capital city. She can certainly wheel her wheelbarrow. First time I saw it ‘twas at the bottom of Grafton Street, now it stands outside Saint Andrew’s Church on Suffolk Street.

Molly was a seventeenth century barrowgirl who earned a bit on the side plying the oldest profession. The song certainly alludes to sex. Cockles and mussels has salacious connotations. Young lovers and visitors to the Fair City have taken the photo opportunity the statue offers. It is traditional to fondle one or both of Molly’s breasts, giving them a sunburst emphasis.

At Bruxelles Pub near the top of Grafton Street, another lifesize statue vies with Molly for popularity. Phil Lynott was black and Irish as Guinness and leader of Thin Lizzy, kings of the Dublin Rock scene. They took a rocked up version of Irish trad balled, Whiskey in the Jar, to the British charts. The ballad records the misadventures of a seventeenth century highwayman whose lover in Lynott’s version is called Molly. So no accident that they’re still close. 

But me I like sleeping

Especially in my Molly’s chamber

But here I am in prison

Here I am with a ball and chain.

(Whiskey in the Jar)

Lynott died in 1985, aged just thirty six. The video for his solo hit, Old Town, features him swanning about Grafton Street, Ringsend and the Long Hall pub on George’s Street.

Oscar Wilde reclines sedately at the northwestern corner of Merrion Square. James Joyce saunters down North Earl Street across from the GPO. Another writer, poet Patrick Kavanagh, reclines on a bench on the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge.

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost

Dishevelled with shoes untied

Playing through the railings with little children

Whose children have long since died

The Palace Bar

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The Palace in Fleet Street is a genuine old style pub dating from 1823. The first proprietor was named Hall. The Ryan family from Tipperary took over in the first half of the twentieth century. The license passed to Bill Aherne in 1946, then to his son Liam and today the pub is run by his son William. It stands on the doorstep of Temple Bar, where the word genuine is oft traduced. I’m not curmudgeonly about it, I delight in most manifestations of the Bacchanalian muse, but the Palace truly remains uniquely oldschool; a place where the discerning soul can commute with the timeless spirit of the capital city.

Back in the day, Temple Bar was a bus queue, waiting for a station, doomed to demolition. Early examples of those things dear to the urban hippy: free love and free trade, were thinly spread on a faded streetscape. These days the whole place is hopping from lunchtime to the wee small hours. The Palace remains unchanged. Always something of an oasis, it rejoices in a literary theme, celebrating Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan, Brendan Behan and Sean O’Casey. Patrick Kavanagh described the Palace as “the most wonderful temple of art”. Amongst the artistic regulars were Sean O’Sullivan, Patrick O’Connor and Harry Kernoff. 

Kernoff became renowned for his paintings of Dublin streetlife and pub culture. The Palace was both a local and a gallery for Kernoff. He sold his paintings off the wall here through the thirties, forties and fifties. Renown at last recognised him in later years, and he died in 1974. Amongst his most famous pub paintings is A Bird Never Flew on one Wing. This was sold off the Palace wall for a tenner or so in the fifties and found its home in another famed hostelry, O’Briens of Leeson Street. There it hung for decades and I remember admiring it over many’s the liquid lunch back in my ad agency days in the eighties. It was sold to a private buyer for a hundred and eighty grand early this century. 

Over the years the Palace has also become closely associated with the newspaper trade, the Irish Times in particular, with their premises just a short block away. Editor RM (Bertie) Smylie would repair here of an evening with a coterie of journalists, in that bygone era when journalism was the thirsty profession. 

This acrylic is a snapshot of a sunny afternoon spent amongst friends. A brief lull in the conversation allows me to throw my eyes around the bar. I recognise a few of the faces, though things are getting a bit blurred around the edges; but pleasantly so. Perhaps I’ll have another.

Dublin’s Temple Bar

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View from Liffey Street

View from Liffey Street

Temple Bar lies to the east of the medieval walled city of Dublin, bounded by the South Quays, Westmoreland Street and Dame Street to the south. Temple Bar itself is a short segment midway along the Fleet Street/Essex Street thoroughfare. The name may have originated in imitation of the area in London which similarly lies just outside the city gates. Or it may be named after William Temple, Provost of Trinity College in the early seventeenth century. Trinity had been established by Queen Elizabeth in 1592. Temple and his descendents had property here, so the name probably recognises both facts.

When I was young this was a dilapidated and largely deserted part of Dublin. A place of well worn cobblestones and crumbling warehouses, the odd quirky shop or hostelry looming out of the smog. You might be picking up a Dickensian atmosphere here, but I’m not that old. The city planners in the 1970s had earmarked Temple Bar for development as a major bus station. As it was, Fleet Street was then choked with busses bound for Crumlin, Walkinstown and beyond. This was where we’d gather to imbibe the petrol fumes mingling with the smell of fish and chips, rain falling, steam rising from damp coats.

Heading towards Merchant's Arch

Heading towards Merchant’s Arch

The alternative society was sussing it out in the seventies. The Granary at Essex Street was a wholefood shop, branching out into a cafe and meeting place. Next door, the Project Arts Centre moved here from King Street by Saint Stephen’s Green, bringing alternative theatre, modern art and underground music. The Alchemist’s Head, making Ireland safe for science fiction, was just across the road. My work in the P&T as then was, Eircom now, also brought me to Crown Alley, an attractive turn of the century redbrick on Fleet Street. A hub of the telephone network, the 1916 rebels had it earmarked for takeover but feared, wrongly, that the British army was in possession. Their failure here and at Dublin Castle were major opportunities missed.

The bus station never flew. The low rents prior to development attracted a creative and bohemian bunch. Representations were made to the powers that be. It was Charlie Haughey, cultured rogue that he was, who saw the light. Temple Bar properties was established to oversee development, the aim to create a cultural quarter for the capital. More famously, it has become a major social hotspot, transforming the narrow, once empty streets, into a day long conga line of partying visitors and locals.

Liquid gold in the Temple Bar pub

Liquid gold in the Temple Bar pub

Some of my old watering haunts remain. Whenever possible I return to The Palace Bar which proclaims its literary and journalistic connections at the eastern end of Fleet Street. Almost two hundred years old, it retains its original old style dark wood bar and furnishing style. High ceilinged with stained glass and a grand glass frontage, all the light pouring in is trapped in this veritable drinking palace. Such pubs are the salt of Dublin’s earthy drinks culture. Our old city haunt, The Crane at Crane Lane is gone. Here we could rub shoulders with Special Branch men from the Castle and seek out ladies from our own suburbs. It happened to be the nearest city pub to our bus terminus. There are many more additions than subtractions. No shortage of watering holes. Temple Bar may have been where the Danes dropped anchor in the ninth century, but you can still pay Copenhagen prices for your Carlsberg here. The Temple Bar pub charges near seven euro a pint, but still the place is hopping by midday. The market here is not price sensitive.

The Central Bank at Dame Street

The Central Bank at Dame Street

From nineteen seventy three, the Central Bank has towered over the area like a modern Bastille. Though I’m sure it’s much more pleasant to work there. Sam Stephenson’s monsterpiece was controversial in many ways. Built from the sky down, as it were, the completed floors hung by visible cables from central support towers. The method itself alluded to a certain exalted origin and function. Getting even bigger for its boots, it was alleged to be taller than Liberty Hall, Ireland’s awe inspiring seventeen story skyscraper of the sixties and trade union home. Labour’s Minister for Local Government, James Tully, stepped in and ordered the completed building to be taken down a peg. In truth, its height was in contravention of the planning permission. But that’s another storey.

Being a tall building, something which the Irish feel should be confined to round towers and spires, objectors considered it an affront, a Tower of Babel. Advocates insisted it would stand the test of time. I sneered then but I’d concede that it has lasted well, unlike Stephenson’s notorious Bunkers at the Dublin Corporation buildings by Christchurch. Passing beneath the Central Bank, it does seem to float in the air, and to form a fine gateway for entering Temple Bar.

Throngs of people now float on down from Dame Street towards Merchant’s Arch. This is the main north south axis of Temple Bar. A perpetual beat on the street has replaced the isolated clack of heels on deserted cobbles. Under Merchant’s Arch you emerge blinking into the common daytime whirr of traffic, the south quays taking westbound traffic, the north quays taking it east. The elegant Halfpenny Bridge arches over the Liffey. It takes its name from the toll charged at its inception two hundred years ago, compensation to the ferryman who previously carried people over. Yeats once championed a Municipal Art Gallery purpose built on a covered bridge here. But the iron structure survives, one of Dublin’s most iconic images.

The Liffey, looking east from Halfpenny Bridge

The Liffey, looking east from Halfpenny Bridge

The river bank in medieval days would have been close to Fleet Street. As the city spilled outside the walls, houses built along the shore faced away from the river. It was after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, that the Royalist Lord Deputy of Ireland, James Butler, the Earl of Ormond, decreed that buildings face the river, with a roadway to form the quayside. This innovation, which Ormonde had observed whilst in exile in Europe during the Cromwellian years, transformed the character of Dublin, establishing the river as the defining character in its layout and aesthetic. The Wide Streets Commission, almost a century later, further moulded the city along neo-classical lines. The extent of Temple Bar was defined by the new thoroughfares, Parliament Street and Westmoreland Street, the widened Dame Street and College Green.

Since the eighties, multitudes have come to this cramped box of little lanes, the discrete vestige of medeval Dublin without the walls. We come here to play, to plunge into the past, to live in the moment, maybe set the course of our future. But mainly to play. There is nothing ostensibly pretty about Temple Bar, it is defined more by function than finesse, a jumble of back street businesses, a mercantile slum. But cities and towns are as much about their people as their built fabric. There’s enough human life here to illuminate the city should the electricity ever be cut off. It shines, night and day.

Westmoreland Strret