Kildare Street Club

The Kildare Street Club was a gentlemen's club in Dublin, Ireland, at the heart of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

The Club remained in Kildare Street between 1782 and 1977, when it merged with the Dublin University Club. Its second Kildare Street club house, built between 1859 and 1860, has not been disposed of but is now leased to a Heraldic Museum and the Alliance Française.

Founded in the year of the Constitution of 1782, the Club's first home was a house in Kildare Street built by Sir Henry Cavendish on land bought from James FitzGerald, 20th Earl of Kildare, later first Duke of Leinster. In 1786 the club acquired an adjoining house also built by Cavendish, thus completing its original club house.

There is a tradition that what prompted the foundation of the Club was the blackballing of William Burton Conyngham at Daly's Club in Dame Street. This led to an exodus of members from Daly's, who formed a new club which soon rivalled their old one as a fashionable haunt and which in the end eclipsed it. Although by the later 19th century the Club was closely associated with the Protestant Ascendancy and Irish Unionism, nevertheless its earliest members included men strongly opposed to the British connection, such as Sir Jonah Barrington, who argued against the creation in 1801 of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In a famous incident at the Kildare Street Club in 1806, Earl Landaff, a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, denounced the "eighty-five scoundrels" who had blackballed his brother Montague James Mathew, and stalked out of the Club, never to return.

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