Allied Irish Bank
Allied Irish Bank, Dame Street, Dublin.
Built 1877.
Architect: Sir Thomas Newenham Deane.
This bank was formerly the Munster and Leinster Bank and was designed by Thomas Deane in 1872 basing the design on the Museum in Trinity College of almost twenty years before. Similarly the Bank has been built in the Lombardo-Romanesque idiom with large round-headed windows and polychromic stone surrounds.
The interior banking hall is magnificent and is one of the most impressive in Dublin. A vast soaring vaulted ceiling dwarfs customers and bank staff. In 1956 the bank was extended with the main facade sympathetically extended along Dame Street but the extension of the interior was less successful.