In a famous family memoir, Annabel Davis-Goff has represented the mental space inhabited by the minorities as a walled garden, secluded and sheltered from the outside world. The chapter considers several instances of how such ‘walled gardens’ actually worked, including the Big House and Protestant schools. One area in which schools were careful to negotiate their relationship with majority culture was the teaching of the Irish language. By contrast, in the surviving Jewish sources it is difficult to find any response other than acceptance of Gaelic in schools. They were in no position to resist or even to complain publicly about the language requirement. Perhaps the most important ‘walled garden’ of minority sociability, linking Jews and Protestants, was Freemasonry. Catholic media denounced the Craft for their anti-national values, secret unionism and theological heterodoxy. Yet, driven by their cosmopolitan ideals and by opportunism, Freemasons adapted to the new order. They saw the Free State not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity to assert their alternative to nationalist legitimacy, one based on the post-imperial value of internationalism.