Dublin Rebels & Literary Giants: From the Easter Rising to Joyce's Pubs
Trace the footsteps of poets, playwrights, and revolutionary fighters through the heart of Dublin
Dublin · 7 stops · 11 min audio · Generated
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1. Trinity College & The Old Library: Cradle of Scholars
College Green, Dublin 2
Step through the arched wooden gates of Trinity College and stand in the center of Parliament Square, surrounded by grand neoclassical cut-stone pavilions and cobblestones. Founded in fifteen ninety-two by Queen Elizabeth the First, Trinity is Ireland's oldest university, educating titan minds from Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett to Bram Stoker and Jonathan Swift.
Look toward the Old Library building ahead of you. Inside its legendary two-hundred-foot Long Room, barrel-vaulted oak ceilings shelter over two hundred thousand of the university's oldest rare books. Marble busts of Western philosophers line the nave, presided over by the ninth-century Book of Kells, an illuminated Latin gospel manuscript created by Celtic monks with dazzlingly intricate knotwork.
Look closely at the Brian Boru Harp displayed in the library: dating to the fourteenth century, this ancient oak harp with brass strings is the oldest surviving harp in Ireland and provided the official symbol for Ireland's national coat of arms, the euro coin, and Guinness stout.
Take in the collegiate tranquility before we step out toward College Green and cross the River Liffey to the historic epicenter of Irish revolution.
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2. General Post Office (GPO): The Bullets of 1916
O'Connell Street Lower, Dublin 1
Stand right before the six massive fluted Ionic columns of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. Run your fingers over the grey Portland stone pillars: you can still feel the deep, jagged scars left by British rifle bullets and shrapnel fired during Easter Week nineteen sixteen, when this civilian building became the roaring heart of the Irish Revolution.
On Easter Monday, April twenty-fourth, nineteen sixteen, rebel leader Patrick Pearse stepped out right beneath this portico and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a stunned crowd of bystanders. Irish Volunteers and James Connolly's Citizen Army seized the post office, barricading the windows with mailbags and hoisting the green flag of the Republic overhead.
For six desperate days, the rebels held out as British artillery shells from the gunboat Helga in the river set the building ablaze. Connolly directed the defenses from a mattress after being shot in the ankle. When the flaming roof collapsed, the garrison tunneled through adjacent rowhouses before surrendering to save civilian lives.
Pearse, Connolly, and fourteen other rebel commanders were executed by British firing squads in Kilmainham Gaol shortly after. Their sacrifice ignited public outrage and birthed the modern Irish nation. Walk south toward the river and the Ha'penny Bridge.
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3. Ha'penny Bridge & The River Liffey
Bachelors Walk, Dublin 1
Walk onto the graceful arched wooden deck of the Ha'penny Bridge and rest your hands on the white cast-iron railing at mid-span. Look down at the dark, peaty waters of the River Liffey flowing eastward toward Dublin Bay. Opened in May eighteen sixteen, this elegant footbridge was the very first iron bridge in all of Ireland, celebrated for its elliptical arch and delicate decorative lamps.
Its official title is the Liffey Bridge, but no Dubliner ever calls it that. Before it was built, an alderman named William Walsh operated seven leaky ferry boats across the river. When his ferries fell into disrepair, city officials told him to either repair them or build a bridge. Walsh built this bridge and was legally granted the right to charge every crossing pedestrian a toll of one half-penny for one hundred years.
Turnstile gates stood at each end until nineteen nineteen, when the century-long toll contract finally expired and the bridge became free for all citizens.
Across the river lies the cobblestone maze of Temple Bar. Step off the bridge onto Fleet Street to find Dublin's most authentic literary watering hole, The Palace Bar.
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4. The Palace Bar: Sanctuary of Flann O'Brien and Kavanagh
21 Fleet St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Stop right before the brass door handle and stained-glass fanlight of The Palace Bar on Fleet Street. Step onto the threshold: unlike the noisy tourist pubs of modern Temple Bar, this Victorian gem has remained virtually unchanged since eighteen twenty-three, with dark mahogany partitions, gas lamps, and brass snugs where Dublin's sharpest pens gathered.
In the nineteen forties and fifties, the back room of this pub was practically the unofficial parliament of Irish letters. Legendary Irish Times editor R.M. Smyllie held court here every afternoon, reviewing galleys of poetry over pints of stout alongside satirist Flann O'Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds, and poet Patrick Kavanagh.
Look at the high mahogany screen dividing the bar: it was designed with frosted glass so that bank clerks and journalists could drink unnoticed by their superiors. Flann O'Brien famously remarked that a pint of plain was your only man, immortalizing the philosophical warmth of a Dublin pub snug.
Soak in the timeless aroma of aged wood, malt, and whiskey. Walk southwest through Dame Street toward the ancient seat of British rule, Dublin Castle.
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5. Dublin Castle: Seven Centuries of British Rule
Dame St, Dublin 2
Walk through the archway into the cobblestone courtyard of the Upper Castle Yard and stand right in its center. Look around at the classical Georgian red-brick facades and the medieval stone Record Tower in the corner: for over seven centuries, from twelve zero four until nineteen twenty-two, this complex was the fortified nerve center of British colonial power in Ireland.
The castle stands on the high ground above the Poddle and Liffey rivers, where Viking invaders first established a harbor. The name Dublin comes from the Gaelic Dubh Linn, meaning black pool, referring to the dark tidal pool that once sat right where the castle gardens are laid out today.
Look up at the Bedford Tower: in nineteen zero seven, the Irish Crown Jewels, encrusted with nearly four hundred diamonds and rubies, vanished from a safe inside without a trace, sparking a scandalous unsolved mystery. But the castle's most historic day occurred on January sixteenth, nineteen twenty-two, when revolutionary leader Michael Collins marched into this courtyard to accept the official surrender and handover of the castle from Lord Lieutenant FitzAlan on behalf of the new Irish Free State.
Collins was seven minutes late, and when the viceroy chided him, Collins famously replied: You've been here seven hundred years, you can wait seven minutes! Continue southwest toward St Patrick's Cathedral.
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6. St Patrick's Cathedral & Jonathan Swift's Tomb
St Patrick's Close, Dublin 8
Step into the lush park flanking St Patrick's Cathedral and pause beside the ancient stone well where Saint Patrick is said to have baptized early Celtic converts around the year four hundred and fifty. Gaze up at the soaring grey limestone spire: standing over forty meters tall, this is the largest church in all of Ireland, founded as a collegiate church in eleven ninety-one.
Look toward the cathedral transept. Inside rests the tomb of Ireland's greatest satirist, Jonathan Swift, who served as dean of this cathedral from seventeen thirteen until seventeen forty-five. It was during his years in the deanery right across the road that Swift penned Gulliver's Travels and his savage satire A Modest Proposal, defending the starving Irish peasantry against English exploitation.
Swift's self-composed Latin epitaph in the floor proclaims that he rests where fierce indignation can tear his heart no more. Beside him lies his beloved companion Esther Johnson, immortalized in his letters as Stella.
Also inside is the Door of Reconciliation, with its famous hole chopped through the timber in fourteen ninety-two where the heads of warring Butler and Fitzgerald clans shook hands, originating the famous phrase to chance your arm. Head back toward Grafton Street.
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7. Davy Byrnes Pub: The Bloomday Feast on Duke Street
21 Duke St, Dublin 2
Finish your journey on fashionable Duke Street right before the polished brass thresholds and striped awning of Davy Byrnes Pub. Look through the plate-glass window at the Art Deco bar, mahogany counters, and murals painted by Cecil French Salkeld: you have arrived at the most famous literary pilgrimage site in Irish fiction.
In James Joyce's epic nineteen twenty-two novel Ulysses, protagonist Leopold Bloom enters this very pub at two o'clock in the afternoon on June sixteenth, nineteen zero four. Bloom famously sits down and orders a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of sweet Burgundy wine, savoring the cool, clean glass and observing that Davy Byrnes was a moral pub because the proprietor didn't chatter too much.
Every year on June sixteenth, thousands of Joycean pilgrims from across the globe dress in Edwardian straw boaters and corsets for Bloomsday, crowding this mahogany counter to order the exact same Gorgonzola sandwich and burgundy.
James Joyce famously remarked that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt completely from the pages of Ulysses. Order a drink, raise your glass, and toast the enduring soul of Dublin's writers and rebels.