The site of today’s Law Library in its previous incarnation as a Solicitors Hall, as published in ‘A Souvenir Album of the Dublin Fighting, 1922.’
The Solicitors Hall was used between 1840 and 1922 for meetings, lectures. It also hosted the occasional lavish banquet for eminent personages, such as the Lord Lieutenant, who dined there in 1912.
The decision, as part of the post-1922 reconstruction, to make the site of the now-destroyed Hall the home of the new Law Library, resulted in barristerial mutterings about being banished to ‘a sort of black hole, where the sun never penetrates.’
Although there was talk in the 1940s of building a new Four Courts immediately across the Liffey, with a vastly improved Law Library, nothing ever came of it and the Bar continues, with the assistance of electric light, to occupy this portion of the Four Courts to this day.
Leave a Reply