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ESB on Lower Fitzwilliam Street - Cathal O'Neill
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The results were favourably received and the following are some extracts from contemporary newspapers.

"The winning scheme is honest, straightforward and very free from gimmicks, neither simplified or too-clever-by-half schools of design. It is deceptively simple but with a simplicity that arises naturally from the programme and is not artificially imposed from without like a straightjacket. Any fool can design a complicated and involved building to fulfil certain requirements. It takes talent and genius to devise a simple answer to the same needs."
Architectural Correspondent, Irish Times.

"It is a poor aesthete who can be satisfied with a fossil. Instead the ESB now offers Dublin a modern building of intrinsic architectural worth designed to harmonise with its noble neighbours yet having the integrity of belonging to its own day. It is better far to have this than the meaningless shell that retentionists would ask us to preserve. Architectural ability and artistic inspiration, it is sometimes worth remembering, did not stop dead in the 18th century."
Editorial, Irish Independent.

"It will be surprising if even the Georgian experts are not pleased with the result of the competition. The winning design has elegance and dignity and the fa�ade fits politely but not too self-effacingingly into the general street picture."
Cork Examiner.

Inevitably, I have considered the difference between first and second prize and wondered how different my career would have been if I had won. At best my practice would have grown and provided opportunities to make significant public buildings as happened with Arthur and Sam. In that case it is unlikely that I would have obtained the Chair of Architecture and all the stimulus and pleasure that resulted.

I also felt fortunate that my entry was accepted. As the deadline of five o'clock on 1st October 1962 approached, I hastily wrapped my drawings and tied them with an old sailing cord and delivered them to the ESB office with minutes to spare. I was about to set off for Mount Carmel where my son Nicholas had been born the previous night, when I remembered that I had left the two bar electric heater on in a office deep in discarded drawings. I returned to the office to find the heater switched on but worse, the principal drawing, the colour perspective, propped against the wall. In despair I rushed back to the ESB where the office was now closed and, after repeated knocking, the door was opened by the grumpy Registrar who ruled that my drawing was late and said that I could not add it to my package as there were a hundred identical brown paper parcels and they could not be disturbed. Fortunately, I was able to insist that I could identify my crudely tied parcel and after an agonising pause he permitted me into the room where I inserted the vital drawing. Technically I should have been disqualified.