The Hellfire Club

The Dublin Hellfire Club was originally founded in a tavern called the Eagle Tavern in Dublin City Centre.

It was started up as a little society for the wealthiest young men of this city. These young men had so much money, they didn't need to work. When you don't need to work that means you've got lots and lots of time on your hands. Time, which you need to fill doing "interesting social activities". And so the Hellfire Club was born as a little society for "interesting social activities".

The young lads started out with the great trilogy of social evils of the day. The first one was prostitution, next came gambling and lastly....drinking too much alcohol! Three things which we probably wouldn't worry about too much in the 21st century Western World...of course.

We're back in the 17th century here. There was quite an important movement happening in Europe. We were going through the Enlightenment of course! This was manifesting itself in Britain and Ireland as a rejection of religion, reason was instead being held up as the standard for all legitimacy. There was a problem growing in society at this point. This problem reached such epic proportions over on the other side of the Irish Sea, in England, that in 1721 a Royal Edict was passed condemning "Young People who meet together in the most impious and blasphemous manner...and corrupt the minds and morals of one another". Blasphemy! Once again probably not something that we in the 21st century Western world would worry about too much, even for the very devout amongst us, these days religion tends to be a private matter and most feel deeply enough about their beliefs or non-belief that it doesn't really matter what anybody else thinks! Most liberal democracies are of course getting rid of their blasphemy laws. In Ireland however, things are a little bit different. Prior to 2009, Blasphemy in this country had been a common law offence. We did not have any blasphemy legislation, no statute covered blasphemy, but because Blasphemy is prohibited by the constitution it was decided that this lack of statute needed to be remedied. In 2009 Parliament decided to act, these days we have a new offence of "publication or utterance of blasphemous matter". It is very unusual to have separate blasphemy crimes in the Western World, and in Ireland any hate crimes which might involve religious hatred would have already been covered by the Incitement to Hatred Act 1989.
Having said all this, blasphemy is definitely not something that people in 21st century Ireland worry about too much! Nobody has been prosecuted under the new legislation and I am sure that if somebody was there would be a deafening public outcry about the matter.

And it turns out the young lads of the Hellfire Club were getting bored of their four great social outrages. They wanted to start doing things which, even we in the 21st century West would find outrageous definitely, in fact sick-making might be a better way of describing it. Unfortunately for the lads, they founded the Hellfire Club in the Eagle Tavern, which is said to have stood in one of two places. Some say it was on Castle Street, right next to Dublin Castle, others say it was on Eustace Street, right in the heart of Temple Bar. Whichever the case, that means the Club was founded right in the middle of the city centre. Not the sort of place you can start doing really nasty, conspicuous things and get away with it.

Now what would you do if you were a group of young lads, it was the 1700s and you had lots and lots of cash. The young boys decided to put some spare cash together and buy themselves a hunting lodge, out in the middle of nowhere at the top of one of the Dublin Mountains. Now it's a story for another day, but let me just whet your appetite: murder, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, black masses and other pretty nasty, occult, satanic happenings were definitely not out of place at the top of the Dublin mountains thanks to the overprivileged, legally untouchable men of the Dublin Hellfire Club.