FOR two of Dublin’s most graceful public buildings, the Custom House (completed in 1791), and the Four Courts (1802), we are indebted to James Gandon (1742-1823).
Of Flemish Huguenot stock, he was born in London where he served his architectural apprenticeship until he was commissioned to design the Custom House, after which he made Ireland his home.
Reflecting his distinct architectural styles – triumphal archways, neo-classical statues, Doric columns and domed cupolas – Gandon bequeathed Dublin a third public building, standing on the northern bank of the Liffey, the King’s Inns, which he began in 1800.
The King’s Inns, which instructs aspiring barristers and regulates their profession, is the venue for this year’s Oxford and Cambridge Society of Ireland’s dinner on Saturday March 31st.
Mindful of the damage the Custom House and Four Courts suffered during the early 1920s Troubles, the King’s Inns’ dining hall, which hosts formal dinners of students, barristers and “benchers”, (senior judges and barristers) throughout the year, is Gandon’s finest surviving interior.
Shortly before the Oxbridge dinner, Charles Lysaght, honorary King’s Inns bencher and chairman of Ireland’s Oxford Cambridge Society, will take guests on a tour, central to which are its many portrait paintings, dating from the late 18th century. One is a self-portrait by John Butler Yeats (father of WB and Jack), a barrister before he turned artist. Another is of Thomas Lefroy (1776-1869), chief justice of Ireland for 30-plus years, and often recalled for the brief infatuation which Jane Austen and he shared for one another, both 20 at the time, before amicably going their separate ways. Austen biographers have argued ever since whether LeFroy and their flirtation were distilled into her novels.
The most famous painting in King's Inns is John Lavery's High Treason – The Court of Criminal Appeal,showing Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916), appealing his conviction for high treason, following collusion with Germany during the first World War to undermine British rule in Ireland. His appeal was quashed and he was hanged soon after.
Of the two guest speakers at Dublin’s 2012 Oxford-Cambridge, Thomas Pakenham, historian and arborist, will lead Oxford alumni in toasting Cambridge. Alternating between London and Co Westmeath, he is the chairman of the Irish Tree Society and honorary custodian of Tullynally Castle.
His forebears served variously as British army and naval officers, as champions of Irish statehood and as politicians of both liberal and conservative persuasion. One of his uncles, Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford, was famously dunked by fellow undergraduates in the “Mercury” fountain in Christchurch College, Oxford, for his Irish nationalist sympathies.
Educated at Belvedere and Ampleforth, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford, Thomas Pakenham started as a journalist with British quality broadsheet newspapers before turning to history. The History of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798(1993), The Boer War(1979), and his award-winning The Scramble for Africa(1991) established his reputation for combining meticulous, balanced research with readability.
His writing then took another turn, starting with Meetings With Remarkable Trees(1996). Interviewed by the New York Timesin 2002 he confessed, "After I'd completed The Scramble for Africawhich was a 13-year effort with much blood and death, I went to my publisher and said, 'You may think me a bit barmy, but I would like to do a book about how to love trees'. Perhaps it was a mid-life crisis. At any rate, the first book had this amazing sale [200,00 copies]. This was a book about a passion. At signings, people would sheepishly come up to me and admit, 'I'm a tree-hugger myself'."
Complementing 78-year-old Pakenham, for Cambridge the guest speaker is 32-year-old Adrian Gahan whose great-great grandmother was an aunt of Sean McDermott, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, while another forebear, his great-grandmother, Mary Ann, nee Costello, descended from the Costellos of Edmondstown (a Norman family which settled in Sligo and Mayo nearly 900 years ago) was the mother of George Canning, a future British prime minister.
Raised in Kilcullen, Co Kildare, Gahan was educated at Clongowes and University College Dublin, taking a first-class degree in history and politics before moving on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he played college rugby and cricket, rode to hounds with the University Drag and took a post-graduate degree in European Studies.
Aside from fond memories of that time, he promises to speak briefly of the threat facing Planet Earth which, by 2050, must somehow provide enough food, energy and water for some nine billion people.
He has made this challenge his own, serving an apprenticeship which included seven months in Washington with former EU ambassador and taoiseach John Bruton briefing US government agencies on EU climate-change policy; six months with British Petroleum as an alternative energy analyst; and three years as an energy and climate-change adviser and speech-writer for the Conservative Party in opposition.
In October 2010 he was appointed MD of Sancroft International, a London consultancy advising global companies such as Tesco and Coca-Cola on strategies to lift their performance in social, ethical and environmental issues. “It’s my generation which finds itself coming of age when this huge challenge reaches its crescendo,” he told me. “Only we can solve it. My parents’ generation didn’t yet know enough to act, and it will be too late for my children to do anything about it. Governments are not going to save the world. People are, and capitalism and the genius and innovation it unlocks. But there is an important role for government too. It’s about finding that balance.”
Details of the 2012 Oxbridge dinner are at www.alumni.ox.ac.uk and www.alumni.cam.ac.uk