A tapestry of multiple histories and of voluntarism both in failure and triumph

BOOK OF THE DAY: Cullenswood House: Old Ghosts and New StoriesEdited by Victoria White A&A Farmar, 138 pp. €20

WHILE RANELAGH is again a fashionable place, it was not always so. By the 1950s it was rapidly becoming a mere point on a map or a name on the front of buses.

It was bedsit land, the social inferior of Rathmines, Rathgar, Clonskeagh, Milltown and Donnybrook. How things changed. About three years ago, one gushing auctioneer even described Highfield Road in Rathgar as “Upper Ranelagh”. Ranelagh has made a comeback.

As a local name, Ranelagh’s original rise was at the expense of Cullenswood. Historically, Cullenswood was the name of the district lying south of the city and now generally known as Ranelagh. Only the “cognoscenti” know that one side of Ranelagh’s Triangle, the south side, is still officially called Cullenswood Road.

Cullenswood House was one of the big houses of the area.

A late Georgian house built in the curtilage of a long-lost Cullenswood Castle, it was built on what was then Cullenswood Avenue, later gentrified as Oakley Road in the mid 19th-century heyday of the unionist Rathmines township.

In the 1830s, the house was home to the famous Lecky family. In 1908 it was sold to Patrick Pearse, who briefly used it as the home of Scoil Éanna, until that boys’ school moved to the Hermitage in Rathfarnham.

Scoil Bhríde, a girls’ school founded by Louise Gavin-Duffy, moved into a modern school building in the grounds of Cullenswood House in the 1960s.

The old house was by then sub-divided and home to a number of families, as vividly recounted by Deirdre Donnelly in the fondest way. It had been ransacked in numerous raids during the course of the War of Independence by the British military, who knew that Michael Collins used it as a base.

By the 1980s, the house was in a sorry state and seemed condemned to demolition. A local group campaigned for the preservation of the house, which had been bequeathed to the State by Senator Margaret Pearse in 1960. The Government handed it over to the Cullenswood House Restoration Committee at a nominal rent, but the committee faced huge problems in financing its scheme of preservation.

Their plan to develop the house as a cultural centre was in the doldrums when, due to the huge unsatisfied demand for the establishment of a new Gaelscoil in the area, a group of parents established what is now Lios na nÓg in the half-restored building.

The remarkable result is that there are now two flourishing but quite different Gaelscoileanna living side-by-side, effectively on the same campus – Scoil Bhríde and Lios na nÓg. The recent magnificent refurbishment project in Cullenswood House has given the building a wonderful new phase of life.

Victoria White, no stranger to these pages, has edited a wonderful collection of essays which trace the history of Cullenswood House as a home, as a historic building of the revolutionary period and as a school.

My good and greatly missed friend, the late Deirdre Kelly, authored one of the contributions. The driving force behind Lis na nÓg, Gréagóir Ó Dúill, authors another.

This book is a tapestry of local history, national history, cultural history and educational history. It is a tale of voluntarism both in failure and triumph. It also includes personal history.

Donnelly’s account of growing up in Cullenswood House in the 1950s is hugely evocative of a recent but definitely bygone age.

These and other contributions from Róisín de Buitléar, Paddy Fletcher, Alan Gilsenan, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Finola O’Kane, Peter Pearson, Ruairí Quinn and Elaine Sisson make for an excellent editorial “collage” that is a pleasure to own and to read.

Michael McDowell, who lives in Ranelagh, is a senior counsel, former tánaiste, minister for justice, equality and law reform, and former attorney general