The Sunday Times

Everybody knows that people who live in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones. All the same, the advice must have seemed superfluous to staff at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, 10 years ago. Their crowning glory, the curvilinear range of glasshouses, the most significant wrought and cast-iron building in Ireland and one of Europe's most important surviving 19th-century glasshouses, was in a state of advanced decay and structural instability. Up to 300 glass panes a year were breaking due to corrosion and movement of the structure. As a result it was closed to the public. "The poor Botanics was going down the tubes," recalls Ciaran O'Connor of the architectural services section of the Office of Public Works.