Programme Two – Writers and Collectors
Sunday May 18th 2025, RTÉ One, 6.30pm
The National Historic Properties portfolio is one of the most interesting property portfolios in Ireland.
Owned by the State, and managed by the Office of Public Works, it’s a fascinating and diverse collection of castles, country houses, memorial sites and gardens, consisting of thirty two historic properties that are open to the public.
Many of these properties were given to the State as gifts, some were bought by the State, and others, including Áras an Uachtaráin and Dublin Castle, came into the State’s possession when Ireland gained independence in 1922.
LEGACY is a new, four part documentary series for RTÉ featuring 15 of the National Historic Properties, with each episode having a specific theme: Centres of Power, Writers and Collectors, Memory and Commemoration, and The Art of the Portrait.
Writer and director of LEGACY David Hare, who wrote and directed Great Lighthouses of Ireland, explains:
“The traditional way to approach this subject would be chronologically or geographically, but instead we’ve done so thematically. The thematic approach enabled us to include very different and seemingly unrelated buildings and sites from very different eras, and weave them together so that the connections between them become clear.”
Episode two: Writers and Collectors
The second episode of Legacy features properties built in the 18th,19th and 20th centuries, completely different in style and purpose and yet linked by their connection to imaginative and creative people.
The Great Blasket Island and Visitor Centre tells the story of an enduring literary heritage created by a unique island community. The building was designed by Ciaran O’Connor, who went on to become Ireland’s State Architect.
He says: “Most buildings, like a good poem, work on different levels and need different ingredients.”
Controversial at the time of construction, the modern design is described by Ciaran O’Connor as: “a stone telescope.”
Dramatically located at the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, the Blasket Island Visitor Centre, opened in 1994 was built to celebrate indigenous culture. Writers such as Tomás Ó Criomthain, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and the acclaimed oral storyteller Peig Sayers are among the islanders whose work is celebrated at the Blasket Centre.
In complete contrast, and on the other side of the country on the northern shore of Dublin Bay, stands The Casino at Marino, a remarkable building inspired by the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.
In the late 18th century, James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont, commissioned architect Sir William Chambers to design a Casino – a little house – that would transport him back, at least in his imagination, to Italy, one of the Mediterranean countries that had entranced him on his Grand Tour. Today, The Casino at Marino is regarded as one of the finest neo-classical buildings in the world.
After a period of dereliction, the Casino was restored by the OPW and opened to the public in 1984, in a project regarded as a ‘masterpiece’ of conservation.
Georgian architecture was heavily influenced by the neo-classical design exemplified by the Casino, and traces of this can be seen at Farmleigh House and Estate, on the other side of Dublin, at the western edge of the Phoenix Park.
The estate was bought by Edward Cecil Guinness in 1873 and the original Georgian building was extensively remodelled and enlarged to provide a country mansion close to the heart of Dublin, and to the brewery at St James’s Gate. Edward Cecil was the great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the founder of the brewery. In 1999 the Irish government acquired Farmleigh as a place to host visiting heads of state and high level meetings. Among its many treasures is the library of rare Irish books and manuscripts, bequeathed to the State by the Guinness family in 2010.
In 1953, another very different collection – a collection of trees, plants and ornamental sculptures – came into the possession of the state, complete with the island on which it’s located. Ilnacullin, also known as Garinish, is a small island in the sheltered harbour of Glengarriff in Bantry Bay, County Cork.
When Annan and Violet Bryce bought the island in 1910, Ilnacullin was a bleak, windswept rocky outcrop with a sparse covering of grass and gorse.
The only structure on the island was the disused Martello Tower, one of a series of look-out towers built by the British military around the coast in the early 1800s. With barely any soil for trees to grow, it would take a considerable leap of the imagination to think that this could ever be a paradise garden.
Now visitors flock to the island to see what many consider to be the most beautiful garden in Ireland.
LEGACY is produced and directed by David Hare for InProductionTV and made with the support of the Office of Public Works
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