Qualla: Frescati House

Frescati House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. On 4 November 1983, in the early hours before a Dublin winter dawn, two JCB excavators rolled across a Blackrock car park toward a stuccoed Georgian shell. The wings had already been demolished two years earlier. The remaining seven rooms still stood, still structurally sound, though stripped of their lead and chimneypieces by a decade of deliberate neglect. The first JCB nudged the wall. There was no crash. 'Masonry fell with a rustle and hiss of dust down ivy-clad walls,' wrote a witness later, 'to thud in moss.' Within the hour Frescati House was gone, and with it the last building of significance connected to the 1798 Rising, the bedroom where Lord Edward FitzGerald wrote his last letters, and the gardens where Thomas Paine had walked. By ten o'clock the rubble had been collected by lorries and dumped in Ringsend. Roches Stores got their shopping centre.

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Frescati House: The Duchess and Rousseau

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. Frescati was built in 1739 for the family of John Hely-Hutchinson, Provost of Trinity College. In the 1750s he sold it to the FitzGeralds, Ireland's largest landowners, and the house became their summer retreat -- one of three principal residences, alongside Leinster House in the...

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Frescati House: Lord Edward

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. Edward FitzGerald, Emily's twelfth child, spent most of his childhood at Frescati and returned to it as a married man in 1793 with his wife Pamela, said to have been the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Orleans. By then Edward was a member of the Irish parliament, an admirer ...

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Frescati House: 1798

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. On 24 February 1798, the United Irishmen's revolutionary plans were betrayed at a Frescati meeting by Thomas Reynolds, an informer attracted by a £1,000 reward. By March, government agents had penetrated the entire Leinster committee; arrests followed. Lord Edward escaped and wen...

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Frescati House: The Long Defeat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. In 1970 a company called Frescati Estates Limited -- controlled by the directors of Roches Stores, then one of Ireland's largest department-store chains -- bought what remained of Frescati and applied for planning permission to demolish it. Conservationists organised quickly. The...

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Frescati House: The Boulder and the Bill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. Roches Stores placed a granite boulder beside the new shopping centre entrance with a bronze plaque commemorating Lord Edward FitzGerald. The plaque contains factual inaccuracies and misspells the house name as 'Frascati'. Hedges have grown up in front of the boulder over the dec...

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