The Keough-Notre Dame Centre at Newman House

As America's pre-eminent Catholic university, Notre Dame scarcely could find a more historically resonant location for its Ireland Centre than Newman House, where Cardinal John Henry Newman founded the original Catholic University of Ireland in 1854.

Newman House occupies two splendid Georgian townhouses fronting the impressive Stephen's Green. No. 85 was built in 1738 for Captain Hugh Montgomery, and No. 86 for Richard Chapel Whaley, both wealthy landowners. They contain elegant plaster work that is considered the finest of its kind in Ireland. Both remained private residences until they were acquired by the fledgling Catholic University of Ireland in 1854.

Paul Cullen, archbishop of Armagh, appointed Father John Henry Newman, as the University's first rector. Newman's seminar treatise, The Idea of a University, was written for the Catholic University of Ireland.

The room where the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins lived and wrote while he was a faculty member, is preserved for visitors, while several rooms vividly recall scenes from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Physics Theatre is the setting for the Tundish episode - a scene Seamus Deane has said is to Irish literature as the 1916 Easter Rising is to Irish nationalism.