At the end of the conference today our Irish hosts, the National Economic and Social Council, kindly laid on a short guided tour to the state rooms of Dublin Castle and also, fascinatingly, to the underground ruins of the Powder Tower and tenth century Viking city wall, uncovered during building work some fifteen years ago. There were some Italian connections: a Bolognese, Gaetano Gandolfi, painted the decorations in the throne room – Murano crystal chandeliers grace the dining room; and an Italian expatriate, Vincenzo Waldré, painted the three ceiling paintings in St Patrick’s Hall – and we also saw two delightful portraits of a very young Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the state apartments. Visiting the Viking Wall, we learned that the wall was held together with mortar made out of eggs, sand, horses’ hair and ox blood! And then, for me and my literary readers (including the Joycean Domenico) came an unexpected connection. The view in my illustration is what those working for the Irish Inland Revenue would see, and still see, when looking out of their office windows in a Georgian annex to the Castle.  A certain Abraham Stoker worked in that building for forty years, and his third son, also Abraham, followed in his footsteps, publishing in 1876 a first learned book entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. This younger Stoker was interested in art (he founded a sketching club) and theatre, becoming a critic and, later, a friend and associate of Henry Irving. He wrote some short stories and, in the 1890s, a series of novels. In 1897 Bram (as he was known) published Dracula. I know that Bram Stoker did a lot of research before writing his classic horror story, but this didn’t involve travel to Transylvanian castles and I would like to think that when he imagined Jonathan Harker gazing out of his bedroom window and seeing the bat-like Dracula flapping on the castle wall below him, he had Dublin Castle’s tower and the adjoining chapel in his mind’s eye…