Liberty Hall

Woah folks don’t seem to be a fan of what to me looks like a Transformer in disguise, transforming to what is the question? An excellent example of our innate need to impress visitors that we are a forward thinking city and all it does is reek of insecurity. Who cares what outsiders think, they don’t have to live here, they just own us.
OK so that aside. I went here for a reading from Jon Ronson’s for the Dublin Writers Festival and it was my first time to go to the theatre there.
We went up to the balcony area and I have to say that I was very impressed as I had an excellent view, I don’t know what the story is for the lower level.
Also I like the second floor foyer so inwardly it’s pretty cool, outwardly well… It’s waiting for us to transform.

I’ve attended her as a SIPTU union member and it is like stepping back in time. The exterior is in my opinion a dreadful scar on Dublin’s landscape. The interior is a shabby homage to late 60’s/early 70’s décor and it looks like it hasn’t been touched since. The sooner they demolish it the better.

The best view of the city of Dublin is not the Diageo Brewery (!), but rather the roof of Liberty Hall. It offers an incredible view over our city, both north and south of the River Liffey.
Liberty Hall today is, of course, a far cry from the building James Connolly would have recognised as Liberty Hall. The theatre is a great spot, the bar decent (Clé Club singsongs used to be here) and one of my favourite plaques in Dublin is here at Liberty Hall, a small plaque remembering the Irish men who fought fascism in Spain during the civil war there.
Is it an eye sore? Yes. The horrific mix-​match windows are the result of a bombing in the city by Northern loyalists, but there is much more wrong with this building than just the windows. It’s aged horrificly.
Them were the sixties eh?

Liberty Hall is Dublin’s only, famously ugly ‘sky scraper’. You can’t miss it as you wander along the quays — it assaults your eyes. It’s still Dublin’s tallest building and is the headquarters of the union SIPTU. It was built on the site of an earlier Liberty Hall which was a rebel stronghold in the 1916 Easter Rising.
Liberty Hall is the last place I would expect to find a theatre but there is a pretty substantial one tucked in there on one of the lower floors (though actually it feels more like a lecture or conference hall than a theatre for dramatic productions). It is also now hosts Cle Club, a traditional Irish music and folk song club as well as the Cois-​Life bar. Liberty’s conference facilities are available for hire.

I’m with Cathal on this one, Liberty hall may have been built to honour the 1916 leaders but aesthetics were thrown out the window on this one. It really is an outdated and ugly piece of architecture.
Liberty hall is the current headquarters of super-​union SIPTU. As a former member I had the chance to see the views of the city from the 12 floor of the building and they’re really amazing, unfortunately this option isn’t available to the general public.
Plans are a foot to pull down Liberty Hall and replace it, lets hope with something a little bit more pleasing to the eye and the Dublin skyline.

If you’re coming into Dublin city centre for the first time, the eyesore that is Libert y Hall is likely one of the first things that you will see.
This buildings sheer scale of ugliness is matched only by it’s importance in recent Irish history. The site of the original ITGWU headquarters and destroyed by English shelling during the Easter Rising, Liberty Hall was rebuilt in the 1960s with 16 floors, one for each of the executed 1916 leaders, or so it is said.
Dublin’s tallest building was once sais to be quite pleasing to the eye: it used to have clear glass windows that gave it a translucent effect. These had to be replaced with the weird opaque tin-​foils yokes that it has now: one account is that this was because of a bomb in the 1970s. More likely is that the people working there were being slowly baked in their greenhouse. Either way, the end result is the ghastly landmark that sits on the quays, loathed by Dublin natives and perplexing to the city’s visitors.
Gross.