Dublin Castle, An Introduction

Dublin Castle is an immense unwieldy pile built by King John (of Magna Carta fame) … It has no claim to architectural beauty, having neither shape nor distinction. It was always the centre of British rule in Ireland, the Irish Bastille. The walls weep, not for the sins of the inhabitants, but because of a fault in the stone. The little river Poddle runs underneath and the whole place is damp, dark, smells of age and mould.

So wrote David Neligan, the famous “Spy in the Castle”, of Dublin Castle during the War of Independence. Following the Norman conquest of Ireland, which began in 1169, work started on a stone medieval castle on this site in 1204, on the orders of King John of England. A fire in 1684 led to the destruction of many of the older parts of the Castle and between that time and the 1760s, the complex was rebuilt, largely in brick, in a similar fashion to the Georgian city growing up around it.

Over the centuries, it evolved into a haphazard complex of buildings that housed various elements of the British administration that governed Ireland. It was best summed up by one visitor as:

… the centre and symbol of Government – that veiled, anonymous, and all-powerful institution, housed in the old fortress … a world in itself, a city within the city. It is at once the Palace of the Viceroy, a military barrack, the seat of administration, and the office of the secret police…

During the First World War, the State Apartments of the Castle were used as a Red Cross hospital. In the middle of this, in 1916, the Easter Rising unfolded around the city. One of the leaders of the Rising, James Connolly, was a patient there for a period, before his trial and execution. By the time the hospital was wound up, in July 1919, the Castle was finding itself increasingly at the centre of a new conflict. Following the outbreak of the War of Independence, security at the Castle gradually increased and by mid-1920 it had reverted to its ancient use as a fortified bastion, effectively under siege.

The name “Dublin Castle” had evolved over the centuries to refer both to the complex of buildings still known by that name today and to the British administration that occupied them. The Castle was at the centre of a bureaucratic web of boards, commissions and offices that were responsible for running the country; it was the principal residence of the monarch’s representative and had a lavish suite of rooms known as the State Apartments that were used for formal ceremonial and ostentatious display; it was a barracks, an arsenal, and, at times, a prison.

By the twentieth century, a reference to “the Castle” more likely referred to an official office or a government employee than a building. In this way, “Dublin Castle” forms the near constant, gloomy backdrop to many centuries of Irish history, not least for the three years leading up to Irish independence.

And yet, for all this, little has been written about what happened within the walls of the actual Castle, least of all during the War of Independence. This booklet is an attempt to remedy that: to offer some glimpse into life within the besieged fortress during its “last days”.