6 The Forty Steps

Homing pigeons were taken by rail, several times a week, to the different outposts around the country, from where they would be released to fly back to the Castle bearing their secret messages and reports.

The Forty Steps

Like the Ship Street Barracks, the Forty Steps were created following the Emmet rebellion in 1803. They acted as a separation or a break between the edge of Dublin Castle and the properties and houses adjoining it to the west. They also allowed for the easy movement of soldiers around the Castle’s perimeter. The Castle wall, to the right, as the visitor ascends, was designed specifically to give an impression of strength. The ever-decreasing panels that form each stretch of the wall suggest a structure that is very thick and strong.

During the War of Independence, the Castle, originally built for defence, was fortified and strengthened against any possible enemy attack. Sandbags were deployed across the site, and barbed wire ran along the tops of the walls, including this one. In between the chimneys on the Castle’s rooftops, large panels of canvas were stretched to act as screens. These were intended to block views into the Castle from the high-up vantage points of neighbouring buildings, to protect the inhabitants from possible snipers.

Behind the Castle wall to the right, are the four State Residences that make up the western side of the Upper Castle Yard (where Mark Sturgis lived). In February 1920, the Viceroy, in a panicked letter, demanded that the rear windows of these houses be protected with steel bars and that strong bolts and locks be provided for the back doors. A civil servant, commenting on the official file, noted (much more calmly):

The necessity for the bars is not evident to the “lay” mind, as to get to these windows anyone would have to climb a 20 foot wall, dodge the sentries and clamber through a chevaux de fries of barbed wire.

However, orders to take precautions, such as the bolts and bars mentioned above, were not isolated, and some of the other precautions taken against the possibility of an IRA attack sound even more curious. An officer from the Royal Engineers had the job of sitting in the cellars beneath the Castle, monitoring a “listening set”, in the hope of detecting any attempt by the IRA to try to mine or tunnel underneath the building.

Postal, telegraph and telephone communications between Dublin Castle and the different administration outposts around the country were increasingly open to disruption or interception; so new options for safe and secret communications were explored. One solution was the operation of a pigeon service, and a loft of pigeons was established at the Castle. It may have been a mobile loft, similar to those used during the First World War (opposite). Homing pigeons were taken by rail, several times a week, to the different outposts around the country, from where they would be released to fly back to the Castle bearing their secret messages and reports.

The precautions described above give some idea of the lengths to which the administration went to protect the Castle. In the end, the building would be handed over peaceably and freely by the last Viceroy to the Provisional Irish Government, in 1922.