Customary exit as Excise staff take their leave

Customs and Excise staff left Dublin's Custom House for the last time yesterday, after an (almost) unbroken tenure of 208 years in their James Gandon-designed masterpiece. They are to be replaced from Monday by staff of the Department of the Environment and Local Government.

The building, which was home to Customs and Excise since it was purpose-built at the mouth of the Liffey between 1781 and 1791, is apparently no longer suitable. Staff are to be relocated to Dublin Castle where they will be closer to the Revenue.

In all, 180 people have moved to offices in the refurbished Dublin Castle, although specific port-centred activities will continue to be administered from the Irish Life Centre, where related staff moved some years ago. A spokeswoman said yesterday that the staff were "understandably nostalgic" as some of them had spent their entire working lives in the Custom House. The staff were not being paid disturbance money.

Their tenure was only once briefly broken when the Revenue and Customs and Excise staff were forced out of the building temporarily, by a fire which destroyed much of the Custom House during the War of Independence in 1921. Although the building was restored by the late 1920s, the long room, where much of the original business was conducted, has never been rebuilt, its grand double door entrance masking a 20-ft fall from the first floor. The building also underwent a £5 million refurbishment in the mid-1980s. One of the first senior Customs officials there, Sir Jonah Barrington KC (17601834), was accused of using court funds to finance a grand lifestyle. Disgraced, he was forced to flee to France where he died.

Another who worked there was Mr Charles Haughey when he was Minister for Health in the 1970s. It was said of Mr Haughey that he rose in one Gandon mansion, Abbeville in Kinsealy, and worked in another, the Custom House. The Custom House was Gandon's first Irish building; he was just 39 when building work began.

Over the years it has been home to the Board of Works where major roads, railways and navigable inland waterways were planned. The building is open to the public and a permanent exhibition is sited there.