HANDS UP everyone who can name Dublin's five Georgian squares. The one that stumps most of us - even some Dubliners may never have heard of it - is Mount Pleasant Square in Ranelagh. It's not really a square, of course, for two sides are oval-shaped and the other two are unequal in length. For that matter, only Mountjoy Square is really a square; the other three - Fitzwilliam, Merrion and Parnell - are rectangular.
Geometric squares or not, these five gems of Georgian Dublin come to mind this year as the Irish Georgian Society celebrates its 50th birthday. The greatest and best known is Merrion Square - called, like its much smaller neighbour Fitzwilliam Square, after Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, whose estate included much of south Dublin as far as Donnybrook. It moved the city's social centre from Parnell (originally Rutland) and Mountjoy squares, from north to south.
The building of Merrion Square began with the west and north sides about 1762 and continued for over 30 years. There were some serious accidents in the early stages. Seven men were killed in 1764 and four years later many more were buried in the rubble when part of a house collapsed.
The west side is the shortest, much of it being occupied by the grounds of Leinster House, with the Natural History Museum, nicknamed the Dead Zoo, on one side, in Upper Merrion Street, and the National Gallery on the other. The museum opened in 1857 with an inaugural lecture by Dr David Livingstone, the great Scottish Protestant missionary and explorer; and the National Gallery commemorates the work of William Dargan, who built Ireland's first railways. There are only a few Georgian houses between it and the corner of Clare Street.
From there, the north side, most magnificent of the four, stretches as far as Lower Mount Street, near where stood Antrim House, the most impressive on the square after Leinster House; this was sold after the 1798 rebellion and became Jones's Hotel until it was demolished to make way for the new National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street in 1938. All the other original houses on the north side are still standing, though most, as on all sides of the square, are no longer private homes but serve as offices for various institutions, such as the Architectural Archive and the Irish Red Cross.
Their external features - doors, fanlights, windows, balconies, railings - have hardly changed; nor have their interiors - stairs, rooms, fireplaces, decorations, plasterwork and frescos. The best description of them is by Nicola Matthews, who until recently was Dublin City's preservation officer. She regards No 12 as "probably the finest" house on the square today. But most of their back gardens and mews have been altered or gutted for use as garages and car-parks.
On the east side, No 30 served as British Embassy offices until it was burned down in 1972 by rioters protesting at the British Army's Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry. The south side, the longest - twice the length of the east and west sides - has the most houses, though these have fewer balconies.
The list of the Square's former residents reads like a Who's Who of 19th- and 20th-century Ireland. No 1 was the home of Sir William Wilde, his wife Jane, who wrote for the nationalist paper The Nation under the pen- name Speranza, and their son Oscar, who lived there for 20 years. Daniel O'Connell lived in No 84, while the novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who owned the Evening Mail newspaper, lived and died in No 70, now the Arts Council offices. In the 1920s WB Yeats lived at No 82. During the Civil War an IRA sniper fired into his sitting-room from a roof across the square, but fortunately missed him.
Another poet and friend of Yeats, George Russell (AE) spent some years in No 84. Sybil Connolly, the couturier, lived and worked in No 71; Erwin Schrödinger, winner of a Nobel Prize for physics, at No 65; and Michael Scott, the architect, at No 19. Sir Jonah Barrington, judge and historian, wrote his account of the Georgian era in No 42. The headquarters of the Irish Georgian Society is now at No 74.
The square's central park was originally for the exclusive use of the square's residents. "Within its railings," wrote William Pryce Mounsell in 1859, "a few ladies take their constitutional walk, while an occasional gentleman is also seen crossing it, producing his key at the gate and locking it after him as he would a wine cellar". It served as an emergency soup kitchen during the Famine.
In 1930 Dublin's Archbishop Edward Byrne bought the park for £10,000 as the site for a cathedral, but building difficulties and increasing costs put an end to this. It had become neglected and overgrown when, in 1974, Archbishop Dermot Ryan and the St Laurence Trust (which still owns it) leased the garden to Dublin City Council for 127 years, at an annual rent of five pence, as a public park for the people of Dublin. After Dr Ryan's death in 1985 it was renamed in his memory.
The park, which attracts about 100,000 visitors a year, is now beautifully laid out with some fine plane, holm-oak, beech and lime trees; it also has a number of impressive statues, such as the modern one of Oscar Wilde (opposite his home) by Danny Osborne and Dick Joynt's bust of Michael Collins.
An interesting exhibition about the square can be seen in the Central Catholic Library at 74 Merrion Square South, from 11am to 6pm on weekdays until the end of this month.