MANY OF DUBLIN’S most important pubs no longer exist.

On both sides of the Liffey and beyond the canals, Dublin’s built landscape is peppered with former public houses.

When writing a book on the social and cultural history of Dublin’s public houses, it is the contemporary names that first come to mind. The story could not be told without exploring the connection between The Flowing Tide and the neighbouring Abbey Theatre, or the importance of McDaid’s in the post-war literary moment, recalled by one poet as “the bohemian shark tank of a decade.”

Yet many of the most important pubs in the story are no longer around.

Gone is Conway’s at the intersection of Moore Lane and Parnell Street, a favoured watering hole of Rotunda staff and parents-to-be eagerly awaiting news from across the street.

For many years, an erroneous plaque on the building claimed it marked the site at which P.H Pearse had surrendered in 1916. Less heroically, the pub had been looted during the Easter Rising. Leslie Price of Cumann na mBan recalled how: “I turned into Parnell Street and came up to a public house in front of the Rotunda, Conway’s I think, at the corner of a laneway. People were drinking away. They had looted the public house.”

While Conway’s is slowly rotting away amidst the stalled redevelopment of Moore Lane and its environs, other former public houses are more difficult to spot. 

Aesthetically, the most beautiful of all Dublin’s lost public houses was The Irish House on Wood Quay, complete with Celtic towers, Irish wolfhounds, the Maid of Érin and the figures of Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan. While pubs would frequently be named in honour of revolutionaries who had died in battle, The Irish House celebrated constitutional nationalism.

The Irish House on Wood Quay Fáilte Ireland Collection, Dublin City Library and Archive Fáilte Ireland Collection, Dublin City Library and Archive

Like Kilkenny’s Home Rule Club, which is still open for business on John’s Quay, the names recalled here were of parliamentarians.

In 1964, when progress led to the demolition of The Irish House, one newspaper lamented how “if the Americans had such a specimen, they would jack up the house and roll it along to another site. Here we have no other use for a 94-year-old landmark of a public house when it gets in the way of site clearance than to knock it........

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