One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

The Lord Mayor of Dublin is elected annually on the 23d of December by the aldermen and councilmen and must be one of their number. He has a deputy who exercises authority during his illness or absence. There are fifteen aldermen and forty-five members of the council, whose authority and powers are very much the same as in our cities at home.

The headquarters of the mayor are in the City Hall, which was formerly the Royal Exchange, where merchants met daily to make bargains and sign contracts. It was used as a prison during the rebellion of ’98, and has had other experiences. As you enter the building through the vestibule you pass into a large circular room, with a dome sustained by many columns, which was formerly the trading place, but is now the anteroom to the mayor’s office and is usually filled with politicians and place hunters, which are quite as numerous in Ireland as they are anywhere else.

The name of the capital of Ireland is a compound of two Gaelic words, Dubh-Linn, which signify “the black pool,” and was bestowed upon it more than two thousand years ago. There is a complete history of the city since the year 150 A.D., when a warlike king called “Conn of a Hundred Battles,” who had long been the overlord of all Ireland, was defeated by his rival, “Mogh of Munster,” and compelled to consent to a division of territory, the line being drawn from High Street, Dublin, across to the Atlantic Ocean near Galway. Three centuries later St. Patrick stopped on his way from Wicklow to his home at Armagh. The people complained to him of the bad quality of the water they were obliged to drink and he relieved them by causing a miraculous fountain to spring up near the site of the present cathedral that bears his name. In 1152 Dublin became the seat of an archbishopric by a decree of the pope and, shortly after the landing of Henry II., became the seat of the English government. In 1210 King John visited Ireland again and conferred many privileges upon the city. In 1394 King Richard came over with an army of thirty-four thousand and lived in great splendor in Dublin. All of the Irish chieftains submitted to his conciliatory policy. The great O’Neill, King of Ulster; MacMurrough, King of Leinster; O’Brien of Munster, and O’Connor of Connaught, the four kings of Ireland, were knighted and promised allegiance, but no sooner had Richard returned to England than the country was again in confusion.

In 1409 the “pale” (or inclosure) of Ireland was established, with the city of Dublin as its capital, a narrow strip of land thirty miles long by twenty wide, which alone was under English control and whose inhabitants alone in all Ireland could be relied upon to respect the royal commands. Dublin has been besieged, invaded by pirates, has been swept with plague and pestilence, and has been fought over by rival princes, but has kept growing, and in Queen Elizabeth’s time reached such commercial importance that it was necessary to erect a custom-house and a lighthouse to show the channel to those who went down to the sea in ships. The people were famous for their wealth and fashion. An official band of musicians played three times a week through the chief streets, there was a city physician, a fire department, an attempt at sanitation and waterworks were introduced, each citizen being allowed as much water daily as would flow through a quill.

In 1661 the people of Dublin spent $150,000, which was an enormous sum in those days, to celebrate the restoration, with banquets, fireworks, a pageant, and various other evidences of rejoicing. And the king, as an acknowledgment, sent the mayor a gold chain and conferred upon him the title of “The Right Honorable, the Lord Mayor of Dublin.” Under the administration of Ormonde, Dublin expanded on all sides, and has since been growing, although from time to time there have been periods of distress and disorder.

The Four Courts, Dublin

Gradually, however, matters settled down into civilization and order. Courts were established, and an imposing building called “The Four Courts” was erected to accommodate the four divisions of the judiciary,—chancery, king’s bench, exchequer, and common pleas. In early times each term of court was opened by a religious service, when the choir of Christ Church would sing an anthem and the dean would offer prayer. One of the boundaries of the Four Courts was a dark, narrow passage, which a wit, struck with its gloom, nicknamed “Hell,” and carried out his idea by erecting at the entrance a fantastic figure supposed to represent the evil one. A Dublin newspaper of that date contains an advertisement reading as follows:

“Lodgings to let in Hell, suitable for a lawyer.”