Administration and society

National and local government

Dublin is the headquarters for government departments, their advisory committees, and associated agencies. The two houses of the Irish parliament, the Dáil and the Seanad (Senate), meet at Leinster House. The judiciary is based at the Four Courts. More than 40 countries maintain embassies, and several others are represented by consuls, both honorary and professional.

The Dáil abolished the county of Dublin in 1994, substituting the Dublin Region of three new counties—Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Fingal, and South Dublin—and the City of Dublin, which has both county and city government powers. The Dáil also replaced city corporations with city councils as the administrative bodies in 2002. The Dublin Regional Authority coordinates the plans, reviews the budgets, and monitors the spending of EU funds by the three counties and Dublin City Council (formerly Dublin Corporation). The council is the largest local authority in Ireland, consisting of more than 50 councillors elected every five years by proportional representation. The council is led by a lord mayor chosen annually by the councillors from among themselves. The lord mayor chairs meetings, but the role is otherwise principally ceremonial; a city manager performs the executive functions. Through the Local Appointments Commission, the state’s Department of the Environment names the managers. Just under one-third of the Irish electorate lives in the Dublin Region’s 12 constituencies, which are represented by 47 members of the proportionally elected Dáil.

Municipal services

Police services are a national responsibility, and Ireland is divided into six police regions. The Dublin Metropolitan Region embraces the city, the whole of the Dublin Region, and small portions of County Kildare to the west and County Wicklow to the south.

The city is home to numerous parks. St. Stephen’s Green, first enclosed in the 1660s and laid out in 1880 in its present form with flower beds, trees, a lake, a fountain, a bandstand dating from 1887, and memorials to various Dubliners, is in the centre of the city. Immediately to the south are the Iveagh Gardens, perhaps the least known of Dublin’s parks. Landscaped in 1863, they include a maze, archery grounds, woodland, fountains, a grotto, and a cascade. The National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin to the north of the city contain some 20,000 different plants.

The Dublin Fire Brigade is run by the city council on behalf of the three other local authorities in the urban area. The brigade also provides an emergency ambulance service for the Greater Dublin area, and several fire stations have ambulances that operate.

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Health

In 2005 the Health Boards system responsible for providing national health care was abolished. In its place a Health Service Executive (HSE) was established. Dublin is divided into two HSE regions. The regions have their own public health ambulance service. There are several private ambulance services, including air ambulances. Dublin contains numerous public and private hospitals, including four university hospitals—the Mater Misericordiae, Beaumont, St. Vincent’s, and St. James’s. All have departments of international repute ranging from children’s care to transplants and diagnostics. The Mater is associated with University College Dublin and is the national centre for cardiothoracic surgery. Dublin’s Royal College of Surgeons is one of the five recognized colleges of the National University of Ireland. Beaumont Hospital, opened in 1987, is the principal undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research centre associated with the Royal College, whose campus it shares. It is the national centre for neurosurgery. St. Vincent’s is the teaching hospital of University College Dublin and a leading biomedical research institute. St. James’s Hospital, which replaced several older hospitals, is associated with Trinity College and houses the Centre for Advanced Clinical Therapeutics, the Dementia Services Information and Development Centre, the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, and the National Medicines Information Centre. St. Patrick’s Hospital, founded in 1746 by a bequest from Jonathan Swift, is a private psychiatric centre still functioning on its original site, just south of Heuston Station.

Education

Founded in 1592, Trinity College is Ireland’s oldest university, though most of its distinguished buildings date from the 18th century. It possesses the largest collection of publications in Ireland, including the early 9th-century Book of Kells and the mid-12th-century Book of Leinster, both lavishly illustrated religious manuscripts. For centuries Trinity was regarded as a bastion of the “Protestant Ascendancy” that governed and effectively owned and controlled most of Ireland. In fact, the college was among the most liberal in the British Isles. In the 18th century, while Roman Catholics were barred by law from taking degrees, they could still attend the college. The Catholic Relief Act (1793) enabled Catholics to take degrees but not to have full standing. All such religious exclusions were dropped in 1873. Nevertheless, Trinity remained almost exclusively Protestant until the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on attending was lifted in 1970.

University College Dublin, established as the Catholic University of Ireland in the 1850s and now a constituent college of the National University of Ireland, is the largest campus in Ireland, with more than 20,000 students. In 1940 Eamon de Valera founded the Institute for Advanced Studies with Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (who became an Irish citizen) as the director of its School for Theoretical Physics. In 1989 the capital’s newest university, Dublin City University, was created from the National Institute for Higher Education. Also in the city are a number of other institutions of higher education, including colleges of technology, teacher-training colleges, and specialized vocational colleges.