Rooms for a rent – An Irishman’s Diary on the restored venue of the 1921 Treaty debates

I don’t suppose it was a decisive issue, one way or another – the 1921 Treaty debates were probably doomed from the start, wherever they were held. But having attended a gala reopening concert in their venue on Monday, I suggest it was the wrong shape for anyone interested in compromise.

Many readers may think (as I did until recently) that the treaty debates happened in the Mansion House. Wrong. That was the venue only for the first meeting on the issue, by the cabinet.

Thereafter, the Dáil assembled in what were then the council chambers of University College Dublin, now the Kevin Barry Rooms in the National Concert Hall.

The historic structure has just been lovingly restored by the OPW, with enhanced acoustics to suit its musical present. But the interconnecting rooms retain a drawback that must have been apparent 95 years ago. To wit, far from being round, like the one in the Mansion House, the space is long and narrow – a bit like Eamon de Valera.

The shortcomings were indeed clear at the time, it seems, if only to the press. The 120-plus Dáil members crowded in at one end, with the chairman and secretariat facing them, in the middle, and the international media at the other end, looking at the chairman's back. Journalists had come from as far away as Japan to attend. But a lot of the time, they couldn't hear what was going on.

Oh well, the debate was probably not fated to end well, anyway. After 12 public sittings and one in private, the split was confirmed and de Valera led the most infamous walkout in Irish political history (although, the past rarely being as dramatic as films make out, he later came back in to join in the vote of thanks to the university for the loan of the hall). A semi-circular seating arrangement would hardly have prevented civil war. Or would it?

Epiphany

Happily, before Monday’s concert, we had no trouble hearing NCH chief executive

Simon Taylor

, as he spoke of how the scene of those fractious debates had now been transformed into a place of “harmony”. Nor did we struggle to pick up the acting Taoiseach when he described an epiphany he experienced over Easter, involving birds.

Enda Kenny had been in the Stonebreakers' Yard of Kilmainham Gaol at the time – the cold, dark scene of the 1916 executions. The walls were "25 feet high", he reminded us, but just above them you could see the top of a tree. And while he was looking at the branches, two birds landed among them, prompting memories of a Patrick Kavanagh poem, Wet Evening in April. "The birds sang in the wet trees," recited the Taoiseach. "And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now/And I was dead and someone else was listening to them".

There followed a moment of even greater historic resonance when Mr Kenny staged a walkout from the venue of the Treaty talks, not waiting to face the music. But of course he had an impeccable excuse.  Together with the descendants of the anti-Treatyites, he was involved in urgent talks of his own, elsewhere, in a room of unspecified shape.

Inaugural concert

His bird metaphor lingered after him, however, from the beginning of the short inaugural concert to its end. The theme was first taken up by master sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird who, with Michael McHale on piano, performed a haunting version of

The Lark in the Clear Air

.

Then, after some exquisite Spanish guitar by Redmond O’Toole, and a sparkling Beethoven quartet by the Vanbrugh Strings, the avian motif was reprised – during a mini-recital from soprano Cara O’Sullivan – by members of the actual bird community.

Yes, as if inspired by her opening choice, Mendelssohn's On Wings of Song, a group of feathered backing singers in the trees outside joined in so enthusiastically that O'Sullivan could not but thank them afterwards for their "beautiful" contribution. Thus encouraged, they continued to accompany her through Balfe's I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls and an aria by Rossini.

Had they been crows, questions might have been raised about how they had infiltrated the OPW’s state-of-the-art sound proofing. Instead, I think, they were a blackbird-thrush ensemble, and added only harmony to the proceedings.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they get invited back for the forthcoming “Inaugural Series” at the venue, which involves some of the aforementioned artists, and others, and continues until June.