CONCRETE walls, bare stone steps, metal bannisters . . . security seems tight. There's a closed door and a buzzer. We travel up in a small lift to the third floor.
Ahh - Gerry Adams is expected. But then he phones the Temple Bar Gallery - he's been "incarcerated with David Trimble at Stormont Castle" and unable to attend the reception for Steve MacDonogh's book, Open Book, One Publisher's War. Still, Sinn Fein's candidate in the Dublin South Central by-election, Aengus O Snodaigh, is there to fly the flag.
The author recalls some of his publishing highlights, such as the first author he published in 1969 - the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize two years ago.
In Adams's absence, it falls to writer Alice Taylor, of To School Through The Fields fame, to welcome the guests. She arrives with first cousin Con O'Connor, a maths teacher at St Brogan's College in Bandon, Co Cork. No, he's not a writer - "I'd be one of the book-buying public." Also from north Cork is Maeve Binchy's first cousin, Dan Binchy, a writer too - his latest book is on the Tuskar Rock aircrash.
Oisin Breatnach, "artist and reprobate", chats about his work - in all its forms. He's studying "the craft of writing short stories", he says, painting and sculpting, as well as working on film and script-writing - "and I'd like go back to poetry." Then there's photography too, he says. Veterinary science? "Yes, I've checked that out, but it's not for me."
The jaunty-looking man in a cravat and leather jacket with fur collar trim turns out to be a Buddhist monk, Sangha Pal, chairman of the Dublin Meditation Centre, is from Glasgow. He was ordained in 1983 and arrived in Dublin nine years ago. "It's my vocation, it's my life, it's what makes me happy." Yes, he does the celibacy bit too, he says. "We do the complete absence of sexual activity in the body, speech and mind."