As residents of Portrane and Donabate campaign for a cultural space, a beautiful hall nearby sits empty

Eoghan Dockrell had a few fragmented memories of wandering through St Ita’s Hospital in Portrane in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Dockrell, who is now a Fine Gael councillor, would arrive at the front entrance to the red-brick Victorian mental hospital for soccer training, he says. “You go down these long, wide corridors where there used to be patients.”

But, while the 175 acres of the St Ita’s campus offer many grassy areas to boot a ball around on, Dockrell and his teammates weren’t there for outdoor training.

They would go into a large auditorium, he says.

At one end, there was even a stage, he says. “And I remember even as a child thinking, like, this is a very impressive room.”

It was a multi-purpose hall, says Paschal Henchy, who was born and raised on Portrane Avenue, and who worked on staff in the hospital for 44 years.

“I remember you wouldn’t be able to get into it around Christmas,” he says. “It’d be packed to the rafters for the Christmas night dance.”

It could host massive crowds, he says. “It could hold thousands, and it was used as a dining hall for six of the wards.”

Like a lot of the hospital, it has since fallen into disuse, says former Fianna Fáil Councillor Adrian Henchy, who is Paschal’s son. “The roof is coming in. There’s a lot of debris. But it was an unbelievable amenity.”

Its potential had sprung back into Councillor Dockrell’s mind during a lot of the local discussions around the need for a community space for the performing arts in the Portrane-Donabate area, he says.

“Isn’t it mad that St Ita’s had this theatre, ballroom, that is now vacant,” he says. “It’s disappointing we have this great amenity that has gone to ruin.”

A spokesperson for the HSE, which owns and manages the hospital, says it has been renovating and repurposing vacant parts of the vast hospital in the last number of years.

But they did not directly respond to queries specifically about the hall.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council was unable to say if they had looked into repurposing the hall.

But the HSE said on Tuesday that the council is tendering for a consultant to prepare a strategy, starting in 2025, for the redevelopment of the campus.

The dining hall

The auditorium in question is actually the hospital’s dining hall, says a December 2013 architectural report commissioned by Fingal County Council.

That study listed it as of considerable architectural merit in the hospital, which is a protected structure.

Photographs in the study show a stage with a proscenium arch within a double height room which has curved-barrel vaulted ceilings.

A lot of the showbands played there, Paschal Henchy says. “You had indoor hockey and music.”

Basketball tournaments were held there, says former councillor and mayor Adrian Henchy. “Those were in the 70s and 80s.”

The stage had curtains, a proper lighting set-up and hosted a lot of productions, he says. “There used to be a drama on RTÉ, The Riordans, and the actors would come out there.”

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the hospital screened films there every Tuesday night too, says Paschal Henchy. “We as young fellas used to go in, and they didn’t mind us going in.”

The Little Theatre

The dining hall wasn’t the only space with a stage on the grounds of the hospital.

There was a smaller theatre on the edge of the campus too, says Paschal Henchy. “That was in what used to be the farmyards.”

The Little Theater was one of several farmhouses in the yard. down a winding road just inside the main entrance via Portrane Avenue. Today, these are decaying structures, covered in graffiti.

The Little Theatre is at the opposite end of the farmyard to its entrance. There is a hole in its roof above the wooden stage, which has two large holes in it.

Weeds grow through holes in boarded-up windows. Ivy crawls in through a doorless frame at the very back of the room.

The walls, like in the other buildings, are decorated in graffiti. Bart Simpson contemplates Earth while smoking cannabis.

Two tags form an accidental rhyming couplet: “Dulce et decorum est,” says one. “Be our guest,” says another.

While the dining hall’s heyday was up by the 1980s, the Little Theatre remained in use until a lot more recently, being abandoned around 2004, says Adrian Henchy, the former councillor. “It was, effectively, the more recent of the two.”

No concrete cultural plans

Local performing arts groups in the Donabate-Portrane area have been looking for a cultural community space for years.

A local campaign run by the grassroots organisation DP Crossroads drew up a petition, which gathered 1,064 signatures, calling on the CEO of Fingal County Council, AnnMarie Farrelly, to provide a cultural, arts and youth community facility in the coastal area.

That petition was submitted to the council on 14 October, DP Crossroads chair Ann Hogan said in an email.

Councillors, back in January, recommended that lands in Ballymastone-Corballis, a nearby large-scale housing estate, be designated for a cultural space.

But they were told by a senior council official that sports pitches were due to be added to the site, while the relocation of Donabate’s library to a disused credit union building would free up space within the existing leisure and community centre.

A spokesperson for the council couldn’t say whether the council has looked into acquiring or repurposing either theatres within St Ita’s.

At the Balbriggan/Rush-Lusk/Swords area committee meeting on 10 October, Councillor Dockrell asked the council’s chief executive for an update on any planned acquisition or leasing of parts of the hospital grounds.

Patricia Cadogan, a senior planner in Fingal’s Planning and Strategic Infrastructure Division, did not provide any updates.

But, she said, the council’s development plan promotes the use and reuse of all St Ita’s protected structures, and it would look to update a 2013 feasibility study, conducted with the HSE, and which would consider how best to achieve any reuses.

A spokesperson for the HSE said on Tuesday that they’re working with the council and the Department of Housing on the repurposing of surplus elements of the hospital, which is still an active health campus.

The council is currently tendering for a consultant to prepare a strategy for the redevelopment of the campus, with the appointment expected by the end of 2024, they said. “The preparation of the strategy will commence in early 2025.”

In the meantime, the HSE is working with the council to re-develop the campus’s cliff walk as a greenway with a nature reserve, they said, with those lands expected to be transferred to the council by the year’s end.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12.34pm on 3 November 2024 to reflect that Adrian Henchy was a Fianna Fáil councillor, not a Fine Gael councillor. Apologies for the error.