House - 16th/17th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere in the vicinity of Kilmainham, a house once stood that served as the official residence of the Governor in 1698, and almost nothing else is known about it.

No address survives, no footprint has been mapped, and the building itself has long since vanished into whatever was built over it. That combination of administrative significance and near-total historical invisibility gives the place an odd quality; it was clearly important enough to be noted, yet too ordinary, or perhaps too familiar to contemporary observers, to be precisely described.

The sole reference comes from Mac Lysaght, writing in 1982, who records the dwelling in connection with the Governor at Kilmainham at the close of the seventeenth century. Kilmainham at that period was dominated by the Royal Hospital, completed in 1684 as a home for retired soldiers, modelled loosely on Les Invalides in Paris. The Governor of that institution would have been a figure of some consequence, responsible for managing a large and formally organised complex on the western edge of Dublin city. That a residence was maintained nearby for whoever held that role is entirely in keeping with how such institutions operated, though the specifics of this particular house, its scale, its construction, its precise relationship to the Royal Hospital precinct, remain unrecorded.

Because the site has not been precisely located, there is no single spot a visitor could stand and say with confidence that this is where the building once was. The Kilmainham area has changed considerably over the intervening centuries, with the Royal Hospital itself now housing the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the surrounding streets carrying layers of nineteenth and twentieth century development. Anyone curious about the built environment of late seventeenth-century Dublin might find the Royal Hospital the most useful starting point, since it survives largely intact and gives a sense of the institutional character of the area during the period when this Governor's residence would still have been standing.

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Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU01229

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