Qualla: Belvedere College

Belvedere College: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pjposullivan, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1832, three years after Catholic emancipation, a small group of Irish Jesuits opened a school for nine boys in a disused Poor Clares convent on Hardwicke Street in north Dublin. Nine years later they bought Belvedere House on Great Denmark Street, a Georgian mansion built in the 1770s for George Augustus Rochfort, the second Earl of Belvedere, with interiors by the great stuccodore Michael Stapleton. The school took the building's name and has been there ever since. Belvedere College has educated boys at this address for one hundred and eighty-five years now. James Joyce attended from 1893 to 1898 and made the school a setting for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Garret FitzGerald, two-time Taoiseach, sat its exams. So did the rebel Joseph Mary Plunkett, who was executed in 1916, and the singer Glen Hansard, who later won an Oscar. In 2025 the school formally named fifteen Jesuit priests who had abused its students, and a longer reckoning began.

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Image: Pjposullivan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belvedere College: The House and Its Sermon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ascend...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belvedere College: Joyce and the Other Writers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 MacD...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0

Belvedere College: The Sleep-Out and the Block-Pull

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belvedere College: The 2025 Reckoning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cianboy, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Image: Cianboy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belvedere College: What the School Produces

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 Gen...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0