Kildare Street Club

[1] This led to an exodus of members from Daly's, who formed a new club which soon rivalled their old one as a fashionable haunt and which in the end eclipsed it.

Although by the later 19th century the club was closely associated with the Protestant Ascendancy and Irish Unionism, nevertheless its earliest members included men strongly opposed to the British connection, such as Sir Jonah Barrington, who argued against the creation in 1801 of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In 1859, the club was described in The Building News as "an institution famous for aristocracy, claret and whist..." Between 1859 and 1860, the new clubhouse was built, designed by Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward, at a cost of some £21,000.

The club committee had altered Deane and Woodward's original Italian Gothic design, insisting on large arched windows divided by thin columns, and the outcome was described as Byzantine.

There they remain spending their days, drinking sherry and cursing Gladstone in a sort of dialect, a dead language which the larva-like stupidity of the club has preserved.

[7]Overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo-Irish, in 1900 the club was called by a member "the only place in Ireland where one can enjoy decent caviar".

[6][10] In 1967 the owner of the Kildare Street premises, Phoenix Assurance, sought permission to demolish half the building and replace it with an office block, having printed the notice in the newspapers in Irish.

The interior of the building was gutted, with the vaulted arcades, stone fireplaces, carved columns, staircase and flying buttresses removed.