Qualla: Royal Hospital Kilmainham

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the autumn of 1679 Sir William Robinson started laying out a colonnaded courtyard on the rising ground above Kilmainham. Within seven years he had completed something Ireland had never seen before: a great classical building, built for no church and no king, but to house old soldiers nobody owed anything to. The Royal Hospital Kilmainham was the first large secular building in Ireland and the first large classical building too - a quiet revolution in stone that anticipated everything Dublin's Georgian century would become.

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: Older Ghosts on the Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The site was never empty. A ninth-century monastery had stood here, whose only surviving trace is a fragment of cross-shaft in the cemetery known as Bully's Acre, four hundred metres to the west. In 1174 the Anglo-Norman warlord Strongbow founded a priory on the same ground for t...

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: Robinson's Quadrangle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Kernan, CC BY 4.0. Sir William Robinson was Surveyor General to James Butler, the first Duke of Ormonde and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He had visited Les Invalides in Paris - Louis XIV's vast new home for war-wounded soldiers, completed in 1676 - and Ormonde had decided Ireland needed something si...

Image: David Kernan | CC BY 4.0

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: The Architect's Joke

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The formal avenue leading to the Hospital ends at the Richmond Tower, a triumphal gate designed in the early 1800s by Francis Johnston - the great Regency architect responsible for the GPO and the conversion of the Irish Parliament into the Bank of Ireland. Johnston originally bu...

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: From Closure to Museum

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the early twentieth century the population of pensioners had dwindled. When the Irish Free State emerged in 1922 there was brief discussion of using the Hospital as the home of the new Oireachtas, before Leinster House was chosen instead. The last old soldiers left in 1927 and...

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Hospital Kilmainham: The National Day of Commemoration

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Every year on the Sunday nearest 11 July, the President of Ireland walks into the Hospital courtyard and lays a wreath. It is the National Day of Commemoration, marking the anniversary of the Truce that ended the Irish War of Independence in 1921, and it remembers all Irishmen an...

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0