The above poem, by ‘Kit’, bemoaning the smell in the Four Courts appeared in the Irish Builder of 1 Feb 1877.
The problem of Four Courts’ stench, recurring throughout the mid-19th century, derived from two sources:
(i) the Liffey nearby, into which owners of nearby abbatoirs were wont to empty their detritus, and
(ii) a forgotten ancient cesspit under the Court of Exchequer (now Court 3), leading to recurrent illness on the part of judges and patrons of that court.
The judge in charge of the Court of Exchequer was known as the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and there is a reference to him in the poem.
The belated discovery of the cesspit, and intervention by no less a personage than Lord Chief Justice James Whiteside to deal with the Liffey stench, sorted the above out by the 1880s, much to everyone’s joy.
Little did the Irish Bar know that an epidemic of typhoid in their old Law Library behind the Round Hall, contributed to by its appalling water-closet facilities, was yet to come!
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