10 things about Dublin they don't tell you in the guidebooks

# 10 things about Dublin they don't tell you in the guidebooks

Dublin takes its name from a dark tidal pool where the River Poddle met the Liffey — in Irish, Dubh Linn, "the black pool". These ten facts are the ones a local guide would tell you along the way, between one stop and the next.

  1. A castle that ruled Ireland for 700 years. Dublin Castle was founded in 1204, on the orders of King John, and English and then British governments ran Ireland from behind its gate for 700 years. Of the medieval fortress, one tower still stands above ground: the Record Tower, built around 1228 to 1230.
  1. Seven minutes for 700 years. The castle was handed over to the new Provisional Government, led by Michael Collins, on 16 January 1922. The story kept in Collins's records says he arrived seven minutes late — and answered: "We've been waiting 700 years, you can have the seven minutes." Today, every President of Ireland is inaugurated in the castle.
  1. The door with a hole in it. In 1492, two feuding families — the Butlers of Ormonde and the FitzGeralds of Kildare — quarrelled over who should be Lord Deputy of Ireland, and the Butlers took refuge inside St Patrick's Cathedral. Gerald FitzGerald had a hole cut in the door and put his arm through it to offer his hand in peace; the Butlers shook it, and the feud ended. The door, now called the Door of Reconciliation, is on display in the cathedral — and the moment gave Ireland the phrase "to chance your arm", to take a risk.
  1. A book made by hand about 1,200 years ago. The Book of Kells is a hand-written copy of the four Gospels in Latin, made about 1,200 years ago, and it has been kept at Trinity College since 1661. It has 680 pages on calf skin, with pages full of colour and pattern. In 1007 it was stolen from the church at Kells and found a few months later, under a sod, without its golden and jewelled cover.
  1. The college where four famous writers studied. Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, and it is Ireland's oldest university. Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Samuel Beckett all studied here. Its Old Library holds the Long Room: nearly 65 metres long, and normally filled with 200,000 of the library's oldest books.
  1. A cat and a rat, kept behind glass. In the crypt of Christ Church Cathedral — the largest crypt in Ireland, and the oldest structure in Dublin still in use — two of the residents are a mummified cat and a rat. The story is that the cat chased the rat into the pipes of the organ, and there both stayed. James Joyce gave them a line in Finnegans Wake, and Dubliners have loved them for generations.
  1. The post office where a Republic was read out loud. The General Post Office on O'Connell Street opened for business on 6 January 1818. On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Patrick Pearse stood outside it and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the reading that marked the beginning of the Rising. The building burned in the fighting, and only its granite façade survived; it was rebuilt, reopened in 1929, and it is still a working post office today.
  1. A 9,000-year lease for £45 a year. In 1759, a brewer called Arthur Guinness signed a lease on a small, broken-down brewery at St James's Gate: £45 a year, for 9,000 years. He began by brewing ale and moved to porter, the dark beer that became known as stout — and by 1886 the brewery was the largest in the world. The company later bought the property outright, so the 9,000-year deal no longer runs. 😊
  1. The whiskey that almost disappeared. In the 19th century, Dublin was the centre of world whiskey production, and Jameson became the best-selling Irish whiskey in the world. Then came American Prohibition, a trade war with Britain and blended Scotch: in the 1890s Ireland had at least 28 distilleries, and by 1966 it had two; the last drops were distilled at Bow Street on 5 June 1970. Since 1990, Irish whiskey has been the fastest-growing spirit in the world again — and in 2015 a new distillery opened in The Liberties, the first in Dublin in over 125 years.
  1. About 4.09 million visitors in 2024. In 2024, around 4.09 million people came to Dublin from abroad, according to Fáilte Ireland. Around 900,000 people a year visit the Book of Kells at Trinity College.

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