- Grandiose Behind the Massive Medieval Fortress Walls of Dublin Castle - & - Ireland's Gems ... -
State Appartments - St Patrick's Hall
St Patrick’s Hall is one of Ireland’s greatest ceremonial rooms. It was developed in the mid-eighteenth century as the Castle’s ballroom.
The hall was for many years the meeting place of the Knights of St Patrick, Ireland’s Chivalric Order of Knights whose flags still adorn its walls.Over the years the richly decorated room is used by the Irish government for official engagements including policy launches, hosting of State Visit ceremonial, and the Inauguration of the President every seven years.
This is the grandest room of the state apartments, and contains one of the most important decorative interiors in Ireland.
It is one of the oldest rooms in the Dublin Castle,dating from the 1740s,though its decoration largely dates from c. 1790.
Saint Patrick's Hall is included in the principal rooms of the state apartment complex,and all the collections in the richly decorated appartments of the castle form an accredited museum.
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Here is an excerpt from Mary Robinson's (President of Ireland) inaugural speech,in Dublin Castle on Monday, December 3, 1990.
(She is an Irish Independent politician who served as the seventh President of Ireland, becoming the first woman to hold this Office.She also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and a Senator for the University of Dublin from 1969 to 1989)
"The Ireland I will be representing is a new Ireland, open, tolerant, inclusive. Many of you who voted for me did so without sharing all my views. This, I believe, is a significant signal of change, a sign, however modest, that we have already passed the threshold to a new, pluralist Ireland.
The recent revival of an old concept of the Fifth Province expresses this emerging Ireland of tolerance and empathy. The old Irish term for province is coicead, meaning a “fifth”; and yet, as everyone knows, there are only four geographical provinces on this island. So where is the fifth?
The Fifth Province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each one of us — that place that is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in. Ancient legends divided Ireland into four quarters and a “middle,” although they differed about the location of this middle or Fifth Province. While Tara was the political centre of Ireland, tradition has it that this Fifth Province acted as a second centre, a necessary balance. If I am a symbol of anything I would like to be a symbol of this reconciling and healing Fifth Province.
If it is time, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus remarked, that the Irish began to forge in the smithy of our souls “the uncreated conscience of our race” — might we not also take on the still “uncreated conscience” of the wider international community? Is it not time that the small started believing again that it is beautiful, that the periphery can rise up and speak out on equal terms with the centre, that the most outlying island community of the European Community really has something “strange and precious” to contribute to the sea-change presently sweeping through the entire continent of Europe?
As a native of Ballina, one of the most western towns in the most western province of the most western nation in Europe, I want to say — “the West’s awake.”
I turn now to another place close to my heart, Northern Ireland. As the elected choice of the people of this part of our island I want to extend the hand of Friendship and of Love to Both Communities in the other part. And I want to do this with no hidden agenda, no strings attached. As the person chosen by you to symbolise this Republic and to project our self image to others, I will seek to encourage mutual understanding and tolerance between all the different communities sharing this Island.
May God direct me so that my Presidency is one of Justice, Peace and Love. May I have the fortune to preside over an Ireland at a time of exciting transformation when we enter a new Europe where old wounds can be healed, a time when, in the words of Seamus Heaney, “hope and history rhyme.”
May it be a Presidency where I the President can sing to you, citizens of Ireland, the joyous refrain of the 14th-century Irish poet as recalled by W.B.Yeats:
“I am of Ireland ... come dance with me in Ireland.”
British-Irish Relations – Past, Present and Future ...
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PROCLAIMING A PRESIDENT
12 November 2018 – 20 January 2019 - Exhibition in Dublin Castle
State Corridor, State Apartments
In June 1938, Douglas Hyde was sworn in as the first President of Ireland in St Patrick’s Hall at Dublin Castle. In November 2018, the Hall will once again be the setting for the presidential inauguration.To celebrate this event and to mark its eightieth anniversary, this exhibition looks back at the inauguration of all nine Irish presidents at Dublin Castle over the past eight decades.
PS : The Irish presidential election of 2018 took place on Friday, 26 October.