Seven thousand cannon balls were rolled around its galleries and 600 men of the Ross-shire Buffs, the 78th Foot, complete with bands, were marched along its floors and up and down its stairs to prove its strength. The Buffs uniquely bore a cap badge with a Gaelic motto, Cuidich'n Righ, the stag's head: thus was the National Concert Hall tested and ushered into this world, blessed by music and the tongue of the Gael, in March 1865, as the Exhibition Palace.
Some buildings are central to a city: they achieve an importance out of all proportion to their size or their beauty. There was a London before an Albert Hall or Buckingham Palace; there was a Paris before the Eiffel tower, and a New York before the State of Liberty. And there was a Dublin before the Palace was erected in Earlsfort Terrace; and though it has none of the majesty of those other edifices, it has an eminence in Irish life far beyond the many functions it has served. It needed a good biography, and finally, it has got one, from the splendid Patricia Butler and Pat O'Kelly, published recently by Wolfhound.
Guinness family
After the men of Ross-shire returned to their glens and lochs, the hall had an inauspicious start to its career. The great exhibition for which it was constructed did not attract as many visitors as hoped, and when it was put up for auction five years later, it failed to meet its reserve of £40,000: I think I might pay £40,000 for it - indeed, might throw in a few quid extra for good measure if I got the Iveagh Gardens as well. Instead it was bought by the Guinness family, who already owned Iveagh House, and they sold it on in 1883 for use as the Royal University of Ireland.
It remained as a university for nearly 90 years, and it is one of Dublin's tragedies that the successor to the Royal University, University College Dublin, joined the flight to the southern suburbs in the 1960s. To this day, it is hard to understand what was going on in the minds of those who made this decision at a time when Catholics in Dublin were effectively prevented from studying at Trinity. This could only mean that Catholic undergraduates from the northside would have to travel lunar distances to and from the new college at Belfield.
Many students from the northside have to study in UCD (though the ban, of course, is gone) and must still make the same ridiculous journey, through the joys of Dublin's modern traffic jams. As an example of utterly cretinous planning and southside self-indulgence it is simply beyond description and belief, regardless of the success of the Belfield campus and of the palace's current incarnation as National Concert Hall. What is almost unbearable is that the self-same southward flight from the city centre caused numerous other institutions to vacate buildings into which UCD could have expanded, such as St Vincent's Hospital, and the three Protestant schools of Wesley, High and Alex (proving that Catholics do not have a monopoly over organisational witlessness).
Philistinism
Yet the Belfield move was not an unmixed folly, for it liberated the old palace for use as a National Concert Hall; and what other building in the centre of Dublin could have served as well as Earslfort Terrace has? In hindsight, it seems absolutely extraordinary that Ireland did not have a single dedicated concert hall until nearly 20 years ago, but that of course merely reflects a national indifference to music bordering on outright philistinism. The teaching of music in our schools is the most backward in all of Europe, and the national broadcasting organ isation is still obliged to pay for the National Symphony Orchestra. There is as much logic in that as making Shamrock Rovers or the Dublin Orthodox Synagogue pay for it.
All this aside, the point remains that Earslfort Terrace has for almost a century-and-a-half been one of the great places of resort in Ireland. It feels comfortable; it reassures, it welcomes, it has a sense of rightness to it. It is as if it is blessed with Feng Shui's most benign wand, ley-lines of compatibility and harmony meeting on the granite steps leading to the main doors. Its position in Irish life has been secured not by the eminence of the many who were educated there, nor by the genius of the musicians who have played there, but by the welcome it conveys to visitors.
Indefinable magic
So even though as a building it is relatively undistinguished, and as a concert hall its virtues are at best limited, it possesses some indefinable but inescapable magic. It is like a relative who is neither witty, nor clever, nor beautiful nor rich, but whose arrival brings joy. Subtract any building from Dublin's structural stock and it would probably not be a catastrophe: but the loss of that dear place on Earlsfort Terrace would certainly be.
Try this. Steal in at night, and go upstairs, and lie down, your ear to the ground: and you will hear the rumble of ancient cannon balls and the tramp of kilted men from the Northern Highlands, their speech soft and slow and mellifluous, the skirl of their pipes lingering in the rafters. They tested this building and found it good, as has everyone who has ever entered its doors. Finally, the charming heap of stone that we call the National Concert Hall has got the excellent biography it deserves.