The first thing that viewers interested in acquiring 13 Upper Mount Street - the Fianna Fail headquarters which goes under the auctioneers hammer on April 11 - may notice is the strength of the hall door. It is every bit as thick and hard as critics of Fianna Fail like to portray its neck.
But the hall door of Aras de Valera, its official name, was strengthened over the years for good reasons. A lot of angry people have come knocking on it during the 70-odd years that "Mount Street" has been a synonym in political circles for Fianna Fail's headquarters, a reverential address to its followers and a den of skullduggery to its opponents.
It was a prime target in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of street protest, and the early days of the Northern Troubles when marches and sit-ins were a weekly, if not daily, occurrence around Dublin. Indeed, it was just like old times when Ruairi Quinn, obviously re-living his youth, recently led his Labour Party up to the door of Aras de Valera to protest against Fianna Fail's continued acceptance of corporate donations.
Of all the protests the hall door has witnessed, including a feeble firebomb or two, the most bizarre was probably during the early 1980s. Instead of attacking the party and its leadership, the protest was in support of the leader, Charles Haughey, who was under attack from within the parliamentary party at the time. Lead by MEP Niall Andrews in messianic mode, it was marked by posters declaring "Don't Forget the Crown of Thorns".
Whatever took place outside the hall door of Aras de Valera no doubt pales into trivia compared with what went on behind those doors. Or so it does in the fertile minds of Fianna Fail watchers - and the tribunals show just how fertile a mind is required of a half-way accurate Fianna Fail watcher.
Every general election since the party's first successes in the 1930s has been plotted and planned there. Countless crises have been circumvented, numerous over-ambitious wannabes carpeted, and endless strategies concocted therein.
It was the centre of the hugely successful web that is the Fianna Fail organisation, the centre from which - in the telling phrase of an early general secretary - word was sent to the grass roots. Once asked for his advice on how to deal with constituency trouble, he made it clear that you don't phone anyone, you don't write to them, you "send word". And "Mount Street" was where the word came from.
Fine Gael tried to cash in on the Mount Street mystique by moving its own headquarters to a similar Georgian building across the road in the early 1980s. And it worked initially, as the party came within striking distance of Fianna Fail for an election or two.
That building cost Fine Gael about £60,000 some 20 years ago but Fianna Fail is now looking for £1.95 million (€2.48m) for its own, no doubt reflecting its successful management of the economy since that brief Fine Gael electoral spurt. The price would be worth it for the ambience and the stories alone, if, as the cliche has it, those walls could speak.
For the pounds per sq ft (or euros per m sq) men who cast their rules over the building, it is more prosaically a five-storey Georgian building of 4,499 sq ft with a mews and parking for "approximately 11 cars" - which means, presumably, that you might squeeze seven Mercs or 15 Micras into the yard.
Fianna Fail is moving to modern new offices at 65/66 Lower Mount Street so "Mount Street" will still retain something of its political meaning. But it won't be quite the same. The new offices will be open plan and, according to McPeake Auctioneers, who are selling the real "Mount Street", will be more in keeping with the administration and organisation requirements of a modern political party.
Is Fianna Fail sending word that openness and transparency are coming to Mount Street?
