It's not just presidents and ambassadors who have houses in Phoenix Park - a busy community lives and works within its walls. Catherine Cleary meets some of them.
JOHN McCULLEN chief parks superintendent
Life in a chocolate-box house is not all sweet. Thick stone walls breathe out a damp cold that only all-winter heating will keep at bay. Your beautiful home might be set in rolling greenness surrounded by majestic trees, but the views are framed from the inside by small windows. There is nothing in the way of remodelled rooms or supplement-styled interiors.
Despite these drawbacks, John McCullen, chief parks superintendent in Phoenix Park, loves his work and his home. "It's a dream ticket," he says as we sit with a cup of tea in the drawingroom of the Bailiff's Lodge, a handsome two-storey house set amid the trees and lawns of Phoenix Park, east of the Castleknock gate, where he has lived with his family for almost 22 years.
He works in the park, walks in the park - "though not half enough," he says, giving the top of his stomach a gentle pat - and has delved into its 19th-century history for a PhD that he hopes will help to protect the park by informing people about its past.
The President, Mary McAleese, and the US ambassador, James Kenny, may be the park's highest-profile residents, but a further 40 families live within its walls. About half of the residents are park staff, retired park staff and their families, and widows of former park workers, entitled to live out their days in the houses where they brought up their families.
"Traditionally, living in the park was a management device for the protection of the park. You had park constables and gatekeepers who had to be here day and night." Until the 1990s, more than 800 cattle grazed the park; the gatekeepers were needed to prevent them straying.
McCullen arrived in September 1984 with his wife, Pauline, and their four children, aged from eight down to two, to take up residence as the park superintendent. Their home, painted today in crisp white and green, was built in the 1830s and designed by the Board of Works' principal architect, Jacob Owen, who also designed Arbour Hill Prison. An office, where fines were collected, adjoined the house. Behind it a kitchen extension was added. Inside the hall are the original yellow and red floor tiles. Beautiful arched wooden windows are all intact.
McCullen taught at Termonfeckin horticultural college, in Co Louth, before moving to the park. The all-ladies institution, run by the Irish Countrywoman's Association, concentrated on the "romantic side of horticulture", such as floristry, vegetable growing and creating walled gardens.
The McCullens still own their former family home, where they ran a nursery, and it will be available to them once McCullen retires. He will, however, be entitled to continue living in the park for the rest of his life. The perk of a home for life in the park becomes a rental arrangement between the Office of Public Works and the worker once he or she retires. Retired workers are entitled to see out their days in their homes, and the houses pass to their spouses but not to their children. The eldest current resident is a 97-year-old widow of a park constable who has lived independently in her cottage since her husband died, more than 30 years ago.
"In the early 1990s there was no interest among staff in living in the houses," McCullen says. "You had to encourage people. A lot of the houses are cold, and the smaller lodges were originally built as a house for one. They're more picturesque than comfortable and not really family homes, although some were extended in the past."
Now there is a waiting list again for houses, as a place in the park becomes more attractive in a traffic-choked city in the grip of a property boom. "They are little gems of architecture, these houses, and the OPW has a policy of restoration."
Like the rest of the residents of the park, McCullen has felt the city pressing in on the boundary walls. "The main pressure is the development around the park, because with every new apartment block or estate, the park is seen as their open space. I think we're at saturation point with events - around 200 events every year. The park is really ideal for passive recreation, such as walking, photography and looking at the deer."
Then there are the 30,000 cars a day passing through. It is, he says, "a planning miracle that the park has survived from the 1660s to today". As part of a new traffic plan, it is intended to upgrade the main avenue for pedestrians. The introduction of the Luas, however, has seen a huge increase in local parking, as commuters drive to Parkgate Street, leave their cars and take the tram into the city centre.
As he shows the way to the gate that leads down to Eamon Mullins's cottage, McCullen remembers that he has almost forgotten to impart his two favourite statistics. "We're twice the size of Central Park," he says. "And you could fit every park in central London into the area covered by the Phoenix Park. I love telling people that. They're always amazed."
EAMON MULLINS retired park foreman
Eamon Mullins retired recently as a park foreman. Since 1968 he and his wife, Peggy, have lived in the Propagator's Cottage, in an area of the park known as the Klondike, near the Parkgate Street gate. There are many stories about how it got its name; one of the more prosaic is that it was originally a quarry or gravel pit. "There was never any gold here, anyway," Mullins says.
"Living here, you're in the country, but you're also in the city," he says. When he arrived in Dublin, in the 1950s, as a teenager, Mullins spoke very little English after growing up on the Aran Islands. He got a job working in the gardens of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, and on the retirement of a park gardener in 1960 he became a propagator in the glasshouses of Phoenix Park, where bedding plants are grown.
The couple's two-bedroom cottage is below the level of Conyngham Road, and traffic rumbles by outside the walls night and day. Sometimes the cottage is colder inside than the weather outside, but, apart from that, the couple have no complaints about their home. "It's a gift," Mullins says.
"I love living here," Peggy says. "You get used to having the peace of not having a house on either side of you." There is nobody to hear their arguments, she says, smiling, adding wryly that they've only been a feature of life since her husband retired. Although he turns 68 this year, he runs between eight and 10 kilometres a day in the parkland around his home. Peggy, a former cross-country running champion, also ran in the park until a recent hip replacement. In her competing days she could easily outrun him. Now she cycles instead.
Over the years the traffic in the park has increased considerably; Mullins sometimes struggling to cross the roads as he heads out on his jogs. "The roads are a highway now," he says.
He has never heard a cuckoo in the park. There has always been too much activity there for this country-loving bird. For a few years, the sparrowhawks disappeared, but now they are back. The wildlife and the trees have adapted to the cars. "I think the human being is the animal mostly affected by all the traffic pollution. Living in the park, I suppose you were never off duty, but that didn't worry me personally. I took on the job, and I knew what it involved and there's a great pride in it."
MICHAEL MOORE retired supervisor and general foreman
By lunchtime, the world, his mother and their dog have come to the park, and the area around the zoo is crammed with cars and visitors. A crystal-blue sky washed clear with a night's rain shows up the trees in technicolor bursts of blossom and new growth.
Tucked in behind the zoo, Michael Moore and his wife no longer hear the sounds of animals and visitors that echoed around them for 43 years. Moore retired 10 years ago from his position as a supervisor and general foreman, and, like the rest of the park residents I met, he seems to be imbibing the same elixir of fresh air that knocks at least 10 years off his birth-cert age of 76.
His five children grew up with the park as their playground. In the early days, before the family had a car, it could feel as isolated as living in the depths of the country. The children have all grown up and bought their own houses, each of them going for as much space and garden as they could afford.
"I say to them: 'You all have your own homes. I haven't. I'm depending on the Board of Works.' " Built from the same black stone, with metre-thick walls, his house, Spa Lodge East, is one of two houses, the wings of which were added in 1850. In the days before computers, he brought files home to his diningroom and worked on them there. "You'd leave the yard at five o'clock, but you'd often bring work home. In a strange sort of way, it wasn't demanded of you, but it made the next day much easier."
Finances were often tight, with little money for new equipment. If they needed to replace one of the tractors, they would have to prove that the old one was beyond repair. That all changed in the run up to the Pope's visit, in 1979, he remembers. For that brief period, there was a blank cheque available when it came to making every blade of grass look glorious for the VIP visitor.
Moore is the son of a farmer, and the idea of farming in the city appealed to him when he took on the job. "We would save hay for the deer and cattle. It was farming, in a minor way. My job was very fulfilling. When I was working, I enjoyed all four seasons. Work was dictated by the seasons. In the summer, there would be grass cutting, then planting in the spring, clearing leaves in the autumn and tidying up in the winter, like you would on a farm. If I had to leave the park and live outside, that would be a wrench."
Now life is about the "unproductive work" of keeping his glorious cottage garden looking beautiful. There is a riot of tulips and deeply scented wallflowers. "See that?" Moore says, pointing to the tulips growing out of the rose beds. "That's bad gardening. Roses are supposed to grow by themselves." Bad gardening or not, the effect is beautiful. Calendar and chocolate-box stylists would give their eye teeth for the image.
DON DORAN head deer keeper
Don Doran will be getting the salmon nets ready soon. As head deer keeper, he will spend most of June tramping the grassy areas of the park where the fallow deer have fawned. With a group of students from University College Dublin, Doran will use the nets to catch and tag the fawns when they are born.
A tiny nick will be taken from their ears, and a hair or blood sample on a cotton bud will be taken for DNA analysis. The sooner they reach them after they're born, the easier they are to catch.
Doran describes Rose Cottage, his house at the Castleknock end of the park, as a bachelor pad. After his wife died, six years ago, his shifts were reorganised so he could be home as soon as possible after his 10-year-old son returned from school.
Doran was brought up on a farm, and he is not sentimental about animals. "But the first time I saw the deer I was mesmerised." When he became head keeper, more than 12 years ago, the deer population was out of control. "They were being knocked down like skittles on the roads." The park's first cull was organised, and the herd was reduced from nearly 1,000 to its current level, of about 450.
The "park constables", or rangers, as they are now known, are the oldest police force in Ireland, with powers to arrest and hand suspects over to the Garda. Handbag snatching and breaking into cars are the most common crimes. "The biggest problem is the public themselves, doing things like leaving their phones in their cars."
If a deer is hit on the road, the Garda will usually call Doran. Living in the park makes sense if he needs to get to an animal in a hurry. If the animal is unable to get up, he uses a humane bolt gun. If the deer is not lying prone, he has to use his rifle. In some instances a car will hit a deer and the driver will not report it, leaving the animal to die at the side of the road.
The park now has two distinct herds that do not mix. There is the main herd and a smaller group, of between 40 and 50 deer, that lived in the grounds of Áras an Uachtaráin for a few years, until their destruction of rose bushes and other plants became a problem. Now back in the main park, members of the Áras herd are identified by tags in their left ears that have been inserted the wrong way round.
Doran once kept a sizeable flock of hens in his garden, and his wife sold the eggs from the house. He liked the idea of a cockerel's call waking him instead of the bleep of an alarm clock. Sometimes he gets passers-by coming up to look at his flower garden, and orienteering groups have put flags on his garden gate.
Years ago there was talk of forming a residents' association among the households in the park, but nothing came of it. "A lot of people, when they retire, the park tends to lose touch with them, even though they still live here."
This time of the year is his favourite. "I love the outdoor life. I wouldn't work in an office for any money. I said to someone recently: 'If I'm ever really ill, make me struggle on till spring.' " u