Robert O’Byrne is an aesthete – possibly Ireland’s only one, a writer specialising in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them ‘Luggala Days: the Story of a Guinness House’; a biography of Sir Hugh Lane; ‘A History of the Irish Georgian Society’; a ‘Dictionary of Living Irish Artists’ and ‘the Last Knight: A tribute to Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin’. In addition to really loving things that relate to the Guinness and FitzGerald Families and the Irish Georgian Society (IGS) which they have led, he writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine and also contributes to the quarterly Irish Arts Review. He publishes a blog called “The Irish Aesthete. This is not an oxymoron”. Tragically for O’Byrne, of course, it is. But this is the least of the issues currently challenging his sensibility. The ascent to pure aestheticism inevitably took some time. After an international childhood and schooling in Gonzaga, during its own aesthetic epoch, he served in a Jesuit novitiate in the early 1980s. In 1986 O’Byrne became the first director of a pilot project in music promotion, Music Network, which some years ago scooped a U2 funding jackpot. In the 1990s he worked as a staff journalist for the Irish Times, often writing about fashion: “Robert O’Byrne’s three-part series on major trends for the season ahead: think long, think luxuriant, think languorous”. He scraped an extended niche for himself arbitrating style more generally: “the most shocking feature of the cluster of Carrickmines houses sold in Dublin last month for some £1 million each was not the price paid nor the speed with which the properties were reserved, but the unrelieved banality of their design”. At the height of the debate on one-off housing debate in the early 2000s he wrote – reflecting his peculiar if consistent focus – ignoring considerations of good planning or sustainability that: “the debate needs to be not about whether development should take place, but about the design and character of that development”. And sometimes he took his taste out of the stuffy walls of journalism onto the streets. In September 1998 he could be found launching ‘Dublin Style: An Insider’s Guide to Shopping’. In the mid to late 1990s he impurely served as the Times’ gossip columnist, hosting a horrible page at the back of the Weekend supplement that mirthlessly celebrated the country’s nouveaux glitterati. He also covered antique and art sales for the Irish Times, with some style. The Irish Times still indeed allows him the occasional essay such as a recent erudite sashaying review of a book on the history of Irish wallpaper, for which all proceeds go to the IGS, though neither O’Byrne nor the Irish Times felt the need to declare his connection to the IGS. O’Byrne’s prose is often original and the judgement sharp, in his columns and on his blog. The blog has a cohort of fans, often genuinely double-barrelled, who outdo one another in obsequiousness. Not unrepresentatively, during 2015 the Irish Aesthete will be visiting one Irish town every month – to berate its architectural neglect. O’Byrne has lots of considered opinions. In a recent collection of essays concerning the FitzGeralds of Carton House, he was hammered by Dr Terry Dooley of Maynooth for criticising its late housing-estate strewn incarnation as one of those “ill considered conversions into spa hotels and golf resorts”. However, his usual percipience can let him down as when he equivocated in the controversy over the recent removal of sculptural busts from the entrance hall at Bellamont Forest House in Cavan, despite the evidence proving them to be integral to the design of this internationally important house by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. Crucially, O’Byrne himself moved to the rarefied setting of Palladian Ardbraccan House near Navan where he lodges in one of the wings. As befits an aesthete whose oeuvre so often touched on its members, and its causes, O’Byrne is Vice President of the Irish Georgian Society (IGS), a membership organisation whose purpose is to promote awareness and the protection of Ireland’s architectural heritage and decorative arts. A fully illustrated book by Robert O’Byrne on the society’s first 50 years was published in 2008 and he has comprehensively ingratiated himself. If anything all had been looking well for his further elevation. O’Byrne was until recently the IGS’s representative on the board of the Alfred Beit Foundation which owns the Palladian Russborough House in Co Wicklow. Sir Alfred Lane Beit, honorary Irish citizen, was a British Conservative Party politician, art collector and philanthropist – nephew of Alfred Beit, a South African mining millionaire from whom he inherited a vast fortune including a large number of Old Master paintings. In 1952, he and his wife, Clementine Mitford, moved the art collection to Ireland. It comprises many of the paintings assembled by the Beit family from the late nineteenth century. While he eventually presented the major works to the National Gallery of Ireland, the remaining collection, along with Russborough itself, was bequeathed to the Alfred Beit Foundation (ABF) which was established in 1976 with a board of trustees. The sale of 350 acres of land at Russborough in 1978 afforded an endowment of almost £400,000 or around €4m in current values. It is not known what has become of this original endowment, but the ABF is known to have been struggling for some time, despite receiving regular handouts from the Apollo Foundation, a London-based trust associated with the Beits, and substantial grants from the Heritage Council and Fáilte Ireland. The ABF has been operating at an annual loss of €300,000 (2013). Certainly this is a problem but there is no sense the costs are being reviewed or that dynamic fund-raising is in place. A substantial salary is paid to a chief executive who oversees an uninspiring, if rising, 24,000 annual visitors to the house. In 2006 a collection of 62 early Italian bronzes was sold for €3.8m and fourteen oriental ceramics were sold
