Bureaucratic Mess – Frank McNally on the old Civil Service Dining Club

On the way home from the National Concert Hall the other night, with the EU 50th anniversary’s Ode to Joy still ringing in my ears, I found myself gazing down Memory Lane and wondering what ever happened to the old Civil Service Dining Club.

The lane in question is not actually called that – or anything, I think. It’s just a gated entry off Earlsfort Terrace, next door to the NCH. But when I first came to Dublin in the early 1980s, it had the CSDC down the end of it. And even then, the club seemed a relic of a bygone age.

The clientele tended to be on the mature side, mostly. Whether they were all civil servants, I’m not sure. Many must have been retired, at least. But I don’t recall you have having to show ID on the way in, so as clubs go it can’t have been very exclusive.

In the event, not only was I a civil servant then, but my first posting was to the Collector General’s Office, just up the terrace at the junction with Hatch Street.

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So the CSDC was the first option for lunch every day, although mainly when you were short of money.

Its outstanding attraction was that you could get a three-course meal there for what a coffee and a bun might cost in the swankier establishments.

Even with three courses, mind, it wouldn’t be a big meal. Everything about the club was austere, especially the portions.

It’s the desserts I remember best, somehow: sad little squares of apple or bakewell tart you could consume daily with no danger of getting fat. Although not quite postage-stamp-size, they were certainly small enough that you could stick one on a small envelope and still have room for a long address.

Eating regularly at the CSDC, you could lose pounds as well as save them. But if you were hungry, or had been paid recently, the club was not an attractive option. Then you would be more tempted by the cafés of Grafton Street and its surrounds, on the far and more exciting side of Stephen’s Green.

I can’t remember when I last visited the CSDC but it was probably about 1985, before a change of jobs that made Grafton Street the default choice. Whenever it was, by the next time I noticed, the club was gone, disappearing quietly sometime between the depths of the great 1980s recession and the dawn of the Celtic Tiger.

Searching for it in the archives this week, I was surprised to find it had existed only since 1950, and even more surprised to learn that, in between feeding bureaucrats on a budget, it had hosted some A-list events in its time.

The key to that, mass catering capacity apart, was its link to the rear of the Department of Foreign Affairs at Iveagh House. Whatever gateways or tunnels were involved, I never noticed any of the diplomatic circuit’s glamour leaking into the club during my visits.

And yet the kitchens had once catered for a garden party during John F Kennedy’s Irish visit, as well as a reception for Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. In 1976, they also won the contract for the inauguration of President Hillary.

That was soon after Ireland’s accession to the EEC, beginning the glorious era that was celebrated in the NCH this week.

But any danger of the country getting continental notions was checked by the then taoiseach, aka the Minister for Hardship, Liam Cosgrave, who vetoed a proposal to include “caviar and fois gras” on the menu.

As revealed decades later in a release of State papers, an official in the Department of the Taoiseach also warned about the CSDC’s habit of overly liberal in dispensing drinks, as if “trying to encourage greater consumption and greater profits for themselves”.

And yet, even while being flaithiúlach, the CSDC managed to be frugal. At a 1973 inauguration dinner, records show, it fed and watered 1,721 guests for £3,075.22.

By the late 1980s, alas, the club was said to be under pressure from the “falling numbers of civil servants using it”. So it wasn’t just me, clearly. But towards the end of October 1988, I did take what proved to be a permanent career break, via a year in Australia. And by an odd coincidence, as I now find, the week I flew south was the week the CSDC went down under too.

“The last cups of tea were sipped at the Civil Service Dining Club in Dublin yesterday,” reported the Irish Independent of October 30th, 1988, declaring the venue “a beloved institution for 38 years”.

Strange to say, the report suggests, it wasn’t changing customer tastes that closed the doors. That umbilical link with Iveagh House must have been the immediate problem. According to the Independent: “staff and customers were informed it was shutting down because it was a security risk”.