Kildare Street Club

The Kildare Street Club is a historical member's club in Dublin, Ireland, at the heart of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

The club remained in Kildare Street between 1782 and 1977, when it merged with the Dublin University Club to become the Kildare Street & University Club, moving to the University Club's 1776 premises at number 17 on the North side of St Stephen's Green. Its second Kildare Street clubhouse, built between 1859 and 1860, has not been disposed of but, as of 2002, was leased to the Alliance Française.

Founded in the year of the Constitution of 1782, the club's first home was a house in Kildare Street built by Sir Henry Cavendish on land bought from James FitzGerald, 20th Earl of Kildare, later first Duke of Leinster. In 1786 the club acquired an adjoining house also built by Cavendish, thus completing its original clubhouse.

There is a tradition that what prompted the foundation of the club was the blackballing of William Burton Conyngham at Daly's Club in Dame Street. This led to an exodus of members from Daly's, who formed a new club which soon rivalled their old one as a fashionable haunt and which in the end eclipsed it. A Dublin Tourism booklet from the mid-1990s maintains that the club was founded in 1782 "as a polite alternative to the notorious Daly's Club, then the most luxurious in Dublin."

Although by the later 19th century the club was closely associated with the Protestant Ascendancy and Irish Unionism, nevertheless its earliest members included men strongly opposed to the British connection, such as Sir Jonah Barrington, who argued against the creation in 1801 of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In a famous incident at the Kildare Street Club in 1806, Earl Landaff, a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, denounced the "eighty-five scoundrels" who had blackballed his brother Montague James Mathew, and stalked out of the club, never to return.

By 1840, the club had some six hundred and fifty members, "a large and elegant card-room, coffee, reading, and billiard-rooms". There was a committee of fifteen members, elected annually. Admission to membership was by ballot, with an entrance fee of £26, 10s., and an annual subscription of £5.

In 1858, it was decided to build a new clubhouse, as the original premises at 6, Kildare Street, were now too small for the club's needs. In 1859, the club was described in The Building News as "an institution famous for aristocracy, claret and whist..." Between 1859 and 1860, the new clubhouse was built, designed by Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward, at a cost of some £21,000. This replaced three existing houses on Kildare Street and one on Leinster Street, which were demolished, giving an L-shaped new building, with an internal plan similar to that of the Reform Club in Pall Mall, London. The club committee had altered Deane and Woodward's original Italian Gothic design, insisting on large arched windows divided by thin columns, and the outcome was described as Byzantine. The new building is adorned by "whimsical beasts".