As close to a “live” blog post as I get, this is a photograph I took earlier today on a once-in-a-blue-moon visit to Leinster House, for a tour of the Houses of the Oireachtas. Yesterday and today Leinster House was holding its second ever open-house weekend – an idea introduced by Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue last year to make this building, containing the Irish houses of parliament, more accessible to the public.
Having missed out last year on getting on a tour of the building, which were booked up ahead of time, this year I decided to arrive early – my main aim being to get on a tour of the Dáil and Seanad chambers which, for every other day of the year, are a no-go zone for photographers, and indeed for the general public. Even the newspapers have to rely on stills from the TV coverage for any photographs of the Dáil or the Seanad that they want to publish.
So to get to photograph the two chambers was my primary goal. I knew the tour’s time in the main Dáil chamber would be limited, and there would be a group of about 20 on the tour, so the time for taking a photograph would be short. I knew what it looked like in advance from television of course, but only realised when I got inside how small it actually is – it looks considerably bigger on the television.
I was glad therefore I had opted for the fisheye lens – its wide-angle view was ideal to take in the full sweep of the 166 seats (actually there are more – a few for official Dáil reporters, and, I was surprised to hear, 12 seats alongside the Taoiseach’s seat for civil servants to advise him and his ministers).
Our tour guide talked us through the workings of the room and the voting systems used and we were ushered out, new members of a relatively small club, comparatively speaking, of people who will get to walk through that room.
Recent Comments