The Phoenix Park gets cold at night. Work as a rent boy there and you soon find out about it. Sitting into your clients' cars is a way of keeping warm, while you make enough money to pay for somewhere sheltered to stay that night, or other stuff to get you through it. And on nights when business is slow, you can try to climb the walls into Farmleigh.
Farmleigh's walls are hard to breach. Once inside, eight houses as well as coachhouses, farm buildings, outbuildings and the big place now in the news give you the chance of a dry night's sleep. But one wrong step and you're out of it, left to your own devices, which means dossing outdoors in the Furry Glen, relying on the comfort of strangers, or getting yourself to a Garda station where they will call a social worker who is the only person authorised to get you a bed for the night.
In the whole big rich cosmopolitan city of Dublin, where people kiss Uncle Arthur's nectar to their gobs each night, there is not one drop-in facility for people under the age of 18 with no homes to go to. The only safe alternative is to try to get arrested.
A tale of three houses gives us one strand of this very Irish story: two big architecturally unremarkable ones designed to fake bona fide pedigrees, and a block of flats built by the women who founded the old St Ultan's Hospital down in the former domestic service training school where Lord Charlemont first built his hunting lodge. The women were Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline ffrench-Mullen, who started the hospital in 1919, the year that Edward Guinness became the first Lord Iveagh, and went on to develop a concept of whole-community welfare we haven't bettered yet.
Friday's news brought the histories together for the first time in years, as word got out that the State may buy Farmleigh on our behalf to maintain the integrity of the Phoneix Park, while at the urging of residents under the care of local TD Eoin Ryan, Dublin Corporation started a valuation process that may lead it to buy St Ultan's flats from a property company for return to the ordinary people of Dublin.
The story of Farmleigh is a tale of rivalry and ambition. Specifically, it's about the competition between two brothers Guinness as they outstripped the upper ranks of Victorian bourgeoisie and clawed their way into the aristocracy. Arthur was more charming but Edward Cecil was the reliable one. When they both inherited the family firm, something had to give.
In 1882, the 42-year-old Arthur was pensioned off with a capital sum of £2 million and released to his estates, including Ashford at Cong. He had already started work on a mock-castle there, with an eye to securing the social standing he believed he deserved.
He made the estate a theme park for the aristocracy, turning wild fields and bogs into a cultivated pleasure park planned around the social requirements of him and his very posh guests. Forests were planted to encourage specific breeds of wildlife and thus afford a good day's shoot. Lakes and rivers were rerouted or created to ensure a charming view. Throughout the grounds, follies and tea houses welcomed lovers' trysts and sheltered the delicate bloom of gentlewomen's skin from the spiky, malicious rain sheeting inland towards Lough Corrib. The Prince of Wales came and was entranced.
That was the measure against which Edward had built Farmleigh. It was bigger, more capital, but somehow less romantic than the theme park in Cong. Yet it was equally designed to impress. Kathleen Lynn knew both houses well. As a daughter of a Guinness's clergyman, Robert Lynn - his church, St Mary's at Cong, later became famous masquerading as an RC chapel in John Ford's The Quiet Man - she had often approached both Guinness branches to help her in her extensive fundraising projects. Kathleen's initiatives were visionary - a hospital with a Montessori unit visited by Maria Montessori herself, the first pilot TB inoculation schemes led by Dorothy Stopford Price, health and hygiene classes for local mothers, and finally the flats at Ultan's and those next door named for Alderman Tom Kelly, with whom she served as a local representative. She had hoped that Ultan's - named for the sixth century saint who cared for orphans after the yellow plague - would grow into a national children's hospital.
But its whole community ethos, never mind the placing of male and female babies in the same ward, made the new State rather uncomfortable. Ultan's diplomacy and networking was naive alongside that of the RC establishment doctors, backed by Archbishop Brown, who went on to build and govern a national facility at Crumlin instead.
Farmleigh had already thrown its lot in with the ruling classes by the time the flats were built. Anyway, Kathleen's contacts with the Guinness family had faded fast. She had not wanted Ireland as a little England with the same ambitions as she had observed within the Guinness family. She preferred a place where class and background did not count.
SO when the question arises of what to do with Farmleigh, if the State's bid is accepted, there is a choice. It could be reclaimed for the city in the spirit of whole community welfare others tried to create earlier this century by integrating a plethora of human needs and activities - a working, wet-weather facility where the social structure of Ireland's late 19th century economic boom is available for view above and below stairs; drop-in, judge-not units for homeless people under 18; an international writers' and artists' centre; perhaps a science museum too as well as yet another conference facility for this meeting-obsessed culture.
It could be an official residence for the Taoiseach, aping the little England model where all leaders must be seen to be gentlemen with a fine country residence. But the State already has ample reception facilities - and if there were to be a Taoiseach's house, better to make it a cutting edge example of contemporary design.
Or it could restate the Gothic parable that inspired it in the first place - high walls to keep the street life out, interior aspirations about how to create a home-grown aristocracy. Farmleigh may become an establishment haven, reserved for the magic tourist circuit on which visiting dignitaries are traditionally whirled. Mind you, there are a lot fewer visiting dignitaries than homeless people in this town.