There was never such a time to buy a house as great and fine as Farmleigh; never a time when the State had so much money that it could afford to buy it without uproar about hospitals and the unemployed; never such a time that the political culture of the country had been so transformed that Fianna Fail could invest in a great Anglo-Irish house for State purposes without shame or fear of attacks from its republican wing; never such a time when the State could buy an expensive and glorious item merely for the sake of having that item; and most of all, never such a time when such an opportunity has presented itself.
And it did. The Guinness family offered Farmleigh to the State for sale by private treaty. Only cowardice, only the last pathetic vestiges of that fear of doing business with the belted earls - in Kevin Boland's memorable words - could have prevented this country from taking up an offer which would have made sense for both the Guinness/Iveagh family and for Ireland generally. What the State would have used the house for hardly matters at the moment; merely that the house was there and we could have bought it, to safeguard it for future generations to treasure and wonder at and wander round for the next thousand years was in itself sufficient. Such an hour will not come in our lifetimes; it will not come in the next millennium. Farmleigh was the last such house anyone will offer to this State. No such offer will ever be made again.
Entrepreneurs
What is going on? Is there some deep, unfathomable discomfiture at the Guinness family? They are who they are: a family of entrepreneurs who, in the British style of things, became titled and ennobled. Many such people have turned their backs on their roots entirely. Go to Mayfair and Knightsbridge and there you will find the Sloane Ranger descendants of the great Liverpool and Manchester and Newcastle industrial princes, the shipping magnates, the shirt manufacturers, the mine owners, the cotton makers. They bear grand titles today, their original family names concealed beneath a titled sheen of shires, dales, hills and moors, either through marriage or by royal decree - Lord This and Lady That.
But dig deeper and you will find that the font and source of the family wealth which enabled them to acquire those glistening, glittering houses in the most fashionable parts of London, and large country spreads in the home counties, was probably some humble steelwright a century-and-a-half ago who learned to make beltfed machine guns, or who patented a new form of riveting, or who devised some machinery for making cotton more cheaply.
Communities
Aside from pigeon-besmattered and neglected statues left in the drab Lancashire or Yorkshire towns the founding fathers came from, and where they made their dynasties' fortunes, enabling their scions to marry into aristocracy, what remains of such individuals in their own place? How are Vickers or Armstrong, Perkins or Leyland, remembered in the small streets where they grew up? What did they leave behind for their own communities in their own places?
Contrast that with Guinness: St Stephen's Green, Merrion Square, Iveagh Baths, Iveagh Gardens, St Patrick's Cathedral, Iveagh House and a huge stock of more modest but nonetheless functionally fine workers' houses: what a vast contribution this family has made to the welfare and the shape and life of Dublin.
A cynical ploy to ingratiate themselves, you say. Really? Why was no such cynical ingratiation visited on the home places of so many other dynastic grandees? How many other towns or cities have been so enriched by their wealthy sons? Might towns not so visited be inclined to envy such cynical ingratiation?
Very well, then. What about old-fashioned paternalism? Who do they think they are, doling out this and that and the other, and coming it the high and mighty over the plain folk of Dublin? A fair point; except that when states look after their populations as Guinness looked after their workforce, with free health, subsidised housing, and gynmasiums, swimming pools and early retirement on full pension, it is called socialism. And when states create or preserve great open spaces, such as Dublin's great greens, and rebuild medieval buildings, such as St Patrick's, it is called enlightenment.
Decent thing
The Guinnesses have done very well out of Ireland; but Ireland hasn't done badly out of the Guinnesses. I personally regret that so many of them have followed the prefix in that bifurcated identity known as Anglo-Irish. But the family did the decent thing in offering the State first option on Farmleigh; and the Government did an ignoble and unworthy thing, not merely for us as a people now, but for the plain people of Ireland in a generation's time, in turning that offer down. For what is likely to happen now is that a hotel group will buy Farmleigh and turn it into a country and golf club, with Phoenix Park to hack out on as an extra little bonus.
Is it too late? Say it is not too late. We have the money; simply to be spared the curses of future generations would make a Farmleigh a thoroughly sound investment. For the house truly belongs to those whose stomachs made its existence possible.