The historic Trinity College Dublin is our venue for the GFIA Dinner. Guests will have the opportunity to view the historic Book of Kells and enjoy the evening cocktail reception in The Long Room. The Book of Kells is celebrated for its lavish decoration and has been on display in the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin from the mid 19^th century, and attracts over 500,000 visitors a year. Since 1953 it has been bound in four volumes. Two volumes are on public view, one opened to display a major decorated page, and one to show two pages of script. The volumes are changed at regular intervals.

The manuscript contains the four Gospels in Latin based on a Vulgate text, written on vellum (prepared calfskin), in a bold and expert version of the script known as “insular majuscule”.The place of origin of the Book of Kells is generally attributed to the scriptorium of the monastery founded around 561 by St Colum Cille on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland. In 806, following a Viking raid on the island which left 68 of the community dead, the Columban monks took refuge in a new monastery at Kells, County Meath.

It must have been close to the year 800 that the Book of Kells was written, although there is no way of knowing if the book was produced wholly at Iona or at Kells, or partially at each location. The main chamber of the Old Library is the Long Room, and at nearly 65 metres in length, it is filled with 200,000 of the Library’s oldest books. When built (between 1712 and 1732) it had a flat plaster ceiling and shelving for books was on the lower level only, with an open gallery.

By the 1850s these shelves had become completely full, largely as since 1801 the Library had been given the right to claim a free copy of every book published in Britain and Ireland.

In 1860 the roof was raised to allow construction of the present barrel-vaulted ceiling and upper gallery bookcases. Marble busts line the Long Room, a collection that began in 1743 when 14 busts were commissioned from sculptor Peter Scheemakers. The busts are of the great philosophers and writers of the western world and also of men connected with Trinity College – famous and not so famous. The finest bust in the collection is of the writer Jonathan Swift by Louis Francois Roubiliac.

Trinity’s long history and tradition of independent intellectual inquiry has produced some of the world’s finest, most original minds including the writers Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett (Nobel laureate), the scientists William Rowan Hamilton and Ernest Walton (Nobel laureate), the political thinker Edmund Burke, and the former President of Ireland and UNHCR Mary Robinson.

The formal dining hall in which the GFIA dinner will take place is steeped in the colleagues history having hosted these and many other fine minds. We promise you a night of fittingly classical entertainment and fine dining and we are extending the invitation to your host nations embassy representatives in Ireland which we hope will make you feel more at home with us!

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