Come Here To Me!

On both sides of the Liffey, former cinema buildings dot suburban Dublin. They have taken on new lives, often as bingo or snooker halls. The old Astoria Cinema (later the Oscar) by Ballsbridge has become a Sikh temple, while Ballyfermot’s  Gala Cinema became home to a carpet shop, Chinese takeaway and more besides.

One I’d walked by several times before noticing is The Casino in Finglas village. Sitting between Supervalu and the Shamrock Lodge, The Casino was perhaps a victim of its own ambition, boasting a remarkable 1,910 seats. To put that in context, a nearby church could hold 1,500 parishioners. The misfortune of The Casino was the timing of its arrival on the scene,  opening in 1955 as the spectacle of television was beginning to loom large over suburban Dublin. Looking at it from across the street, it retains the very distinct appearance of a suburban cinema, despite its entrance being swallowed up by new development.

Constructed by Maher and Murphy, a building company based on Dublin’s Aughrim Street, the new cinema became an integral of a suburb that was very new, much like Artane and Ballyfermot on the other side of the Liffey.  Almost overnight, it seemed to the Evening Herald that Finglas, “a picturesque Dublin village, has become one of the largest housing estates in the city.” New suburbs required churches, schools, shops and cinemas.

The Evening Herald praised the building, noting that “the front of the three-story Casino is done in red brick relieved with reconstructed stone and is a most imposing structure with two shops, one on each side. A feature of the entrance is the fact there are doors leading to the foyer.”

Evening Herald report on opening of cinema.

The new suburbs saw an influx of families from the inner-city, where tenements remained a subject of worry to many, and which continued to pose a grave threat to the welfare of Dubliners, with four lives lost to tenement collapses in 1963. In the below RTÉ feature from 1964, it is clear that some were quite content to move to Finglas. One youngster interviews mentions there being “plenty of fields to play in”,while another talks of her joy of having hot water in her household. Still, local amenities were often slow to pop up in new suburbia, creating alienation and boredom. The actor Brendan O’Caroll remembered the positive impact of The Casino in the area in the absence of other amenities, recalling that “I loved the fact you could go to the pictures and imagine you were the boy up there on the screen. I never thought that one day I’d ever be in a movie, that would be crazy, but the films allowed you the chance to dream, to use your imagination.”

What nobody could predict when the doors of The Casino opened was the impact of television in the following decade. In a city and county that boasted no fewer than 56 cinemas in 1956, the arrival of television into the living rooms of suburbia heralded their death kneel. Cinemas sometimes took on a new lease of life as concert venues, with The Ramones  famously playing in Cabra and Phibsboro cinemas, while The Casino hosted concerts of its own.

Evening Herald, 1968.

What suburbia felt it needed now was not cinema, but shopping centres. By 1970, The Casino was a memory,  replaced by Superquinn. Still, the facade remains today, reminding many locals of simpler times.