Dead Sails in the Sunset: Frank McNally on the cultural evolution of a Dublin windmill

If the buildings around St Patrick’s Tower in Dublin are now the Digital Hub, as they are, then I suppose the tower’s green dome must be the Digital Hubcap.

But the upper reaches of what used to be a windmill are still off-limits to the public. And the focus of an event on Wednesday night was 40 metres below the copper cupola: the opening of the ground floor as a new cultural space.

The inaugural concert did not put wind in the old mill’s sails, because it no longer has sails, Not since 1820, when steam rendered them redundant.

Even so, aptly, there were some wind instruments – a set of uilleann pipes and a flute – involved in a show that marked the building’s transition from industrial past to cultural future.

The ground-floor venue will help belatedly put the tower on the map of Dublin. For although its silhouette is an unmistakable landmark on the south inner-city skyline, the name is not well known beyond the neighbourhood.

That may be in part because it was a historic afterthought. The original smock windmill, so called for its resemblance in shape to the garment, was a purely functional facility, built in 1757 and long the tallest of its kind in Europe.

Milling grain for whiskey, it became the centrepiece of Roe’s Distillery, which over the next 150 years grew to be world’s biggest, covering 17 acres from Thomas Street to the Liffey, with a mile of conveyor belts turning 1,500 barrels of barley a day into an annual two million gallons of alcohol.

That was a glory era for Irish whiskey generally, and the Liberties version in particular. The “Golden Triangle” of local distilleries then also included those of the two Johns, Jameson and Power.

But thanks to steam, the working windmill was soon superfluous. And it was only when the sails were long gone, in the late 19th century, that the tower acquired an onion-shaped dome along with a weathervane that gave it its modern name.

[ Free Show: Frank McNally on the liberating power of prison artOpens in new window ]

You may strain to see it from the ground, but that’s a four-foot-high St Patrick on the top.

In a development Father Mathew would have approved of, the national saint’s likeness went on to overlook a precipitous decline in the fortunes not just of Roe’s but of Irish whiskey generally, which spent the next century becoming a poor relation to Scotch.

Mind you, in the meantime, the behemoth that is Guinness rose to take over the 17 acres vacated by the distillers.

It’s a curious footnote to history, of which Father Mathew would surely not approve, that the two great cathedrals of Dublin 8 are both, in a sense, monuments to drink.

St Patrick’s was rescued from near ruin in the 1860s by the benevolence of Benjamin Guinness. Then Henry Roe underwrote a similarly expensive refurbishment of Christ Church, which helped usher his company towards ruin instead.

[ Mr Nobody and a broken vase: Frank McNally on a British Museum accident with historic resonanceOpens in new window ]

Amid all this rise and fall of business empires, by the way, someone planted a pear tree beside the old windmill in 1850. A century-and-three-quarters later, it’s still there and producing fruit.

Wednesday night’s celebration of the new cultural space, hosted by Digital Hub CEO Fiach Mac Conghail, included the world premiere of a poem specially commissioned for the occasion.

“The Angels’ Share” by Annemarie Ní Churreáin takes its title from the portion of a spirit that evaporates during oak-barrel maturation, although in the poet’s telling the evaporation in this case animated the surrounding community:

“And the angels’ share is the woodsweet heart of Dublin/trembling, like a secret cabinet of bees, in a garden of thyme/a colony of wings, in this city within a city/that is eternally flickering.”

The night also featured music from Na Píobairí Uilleann and a young folk band, Heron Red, recent graduates of the local BIMM musical school that also produced Fontaines DC.

Towards the other end of the oak-barrel maturation spectrum, meanwhile, there was an unofficial competition between poet/Irish Times man Gerard Smyth and the veteran trade unionist/singer Des Geraghty as to which was the most aboriginal citizen of the Liberties present.

[ Irish Book Awards: Maggie O’Farrell, Vincent Browne, Sally Hayden and Louise Kennedy on shortlistOpens in new window ]

Smyth grew up in Francis Street and read poems inspired by such memories as Mushatt’s Pharmacy (operated by two Lithuanian brothers who attracted queues outside the shop on Sunday mornings, supposedly for their trademark hangover cure).

Geraghty was born in Cornmarket, before it was destroyed to make way for a dual carriageway, and went to St Audoen’s National School, “on the city walls”. Like all true Libertarians, as he told me afterwards, he also grew up hearing stories of an urban banshee variant who haunts the “Forty Steps” in particular.

I don’t know whether historic sightings of her were influenced by the amount of angels’ share whiskey in the surrounding air. But hearing about her reminded me of an old nickname for absinthe. And just in case she needed immortalisation, Des did the job a few years ago by writing a fine song about her called “The Green Lady”.