Belvedere House is one of the finest Georgian interiors in Dublin. Michael Stapleton's plasterwork, designed for the Earl of Belvedere in the 1770s, survives in the school's ceremonial rooms - the kind of cherubs and garlands and classical scrolls that Dublin's Anglo-Irish ascendancy commissioned to demonstrate their European sophistication. The Jesuits bought it for a school in 1841. Young Joyce sat in those rooms and absorbed the contradictions: ancient Catholic schooling in Protestant aristocratic surroundings, the language of the colonisers spoken in the cadences of the colonised. He was elected Student Prefect of the Sodality of Our Lady in 1896, and the famous hellfire sermons in Chapter III of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are modelled on those given at a 1897 Belvedere retreat by Father James Aloysius Cullen, the school's spiritual director for twenty years. Joyce's English teacher, George Dempsey, became the model for Mr Tate in the same novel. A school class group was named 'Dempsey' in his honour for decades.

Joyce was the most famous Belvedere writer but not the only one. The poet Austin Clarke passed through. So did Liam O'Flaherty, the novelist of Famine and Skerrett who had been a Jesuit novice before turning Marxist and then republican. The poet Denis Devlin attended. Donagh MacDonagh - poet, playwright, broadcaster, and son of the executed 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh - was a Belvederian. So was Mervyn Wall, whose Fursey novels about a hapless seventh-century monk are the strangest comic Irish fiction of the twentieth century. The artist Harry Clarke, whose stained-glass windows light up churches all over Ireland, was an Old Belvederian. So was Francis Browne, the Jesuit photographer who took some of the only known photographs of the Titanic in 1912 - he disembarked at Queenstown before the ship met its iceberg, and his pictures of life aboard during the first leg of the voyage have ended up illustrating most books on the subject ever since.

Modern Belvedere defines itself in part through two charitable institutions. The Block-Pull is a charity walk that students have undertaken every summer since 1981, from Dublin to Galway. The proceeds go to Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind, St Francis Hospice, and the Temple Street Children's University Hospital - the children's hospital that sits a short walk from the school's front gate. A single block-pull has raised over 70,000 euro. The Sleep-Out takes place every year from 22 to 24 December: students fast for twenty-four hours and 'go homeless' on Dublin's O'Connell Street for three days and two nights, raising money for Focus Ireland, the Home Again Society, and Father Peter McVerry's homelessness charity. In 2022 the Sleep-Out set a new record of over 304,000 euro raised. The school's motto is Per Vias Rectas - 'By Straight Paths' - and the Sodality language about 'Men for Others' descends directly from the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum that names the school years Elements, Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, and Rhetoric. Father Peter McVerry, the homeless-services priest, was himself a teacher at Belvedere.

In 2025 the school formally named fifteen Jesuit priests who had physically and sexually abused students over decades. The list included Father Jack Leonard, who served as Prefect of Studies - effectively head of the senior school - through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, and Fathers Brendan Kearney and Joseph Marmion. The naming was the result of years of pressure from survivors, an Irish Jesuit Province admission process, and the slow public reckoning with abuse in Catholic Irish institutions that began with the Ferns Report in 2005 and the Ryan Report in 2009. For the survivors, the names mattered. Saying them publicly, in connection with the school where the abuse took place, was part of what survivors had asked for. The boys who walked Belvedere's corridors in the decades when these men were in charge are now in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Some did not survive long enough to hear the names read out. The school continues. So does the work of telling its history honestly.

Belvedere's roll of alumni reads like a directory of modern Irish public life. Politicians: Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, Tánaiste Brian Lenihan, Joseph Mary Plunkett who signed the 1916 Proclamation and was shot for it a month later. Lawyers: Supreme Court justices, Attorneys General, the founder of the Arthur Cox law firm. Archbishops of Dublin including Cardinal Desmond Connell and Dermot Ryan. The architects Michael Scott and Sam Stephenson, who shaped much of modern Dublin's skyline. Sports figures from the rugby internationals Cian Healy and Karl Mullen to the showjumper Cian O'Connor and the Olympic horse-racing trainer Pat Taaffe, who rode Arkle to the 1964 Cheltenham Gold Cup. Broadcasters Terry Wogan and Henry Kelly. The musician Glen Hansard. The rapper Rejjie Snow. The actor Jack Reynor. The school's role in Irish public life is so large that asking what Dublin would look like without Belvedere is essentially asking what modern Ireland would look like - an unanswerable question, given how much of the country its alumni have made.