22 Best Things to Do in Dublin, Ireland

A friend who kept correcting my pronunciation of Dorset Street walked me through Dublin, not just look at, and none of it matched the pamphlet I had been handed at the airport. I followed Cathal, who grew up three streets from the Royal Canal in Drumcondra and who spent his childhood being handed small pieces of local knowledge by his grandmother the way other kids get pocket money. Every stop below has something you actually do there, a soap to buy, a wall to look up at, a hill to climb, not just a landmark to photograph and move past.

1.Go Find Behan's Bench on the Royal Canal at Binn's Bridge

Do this: walk the towpath from Dorset Street to the second lock and look down at the statue's boots before you photograph it. Notice: the three bronze triangles beside Behan are not decoration, they come straight from his prison song about Mountjoy.

Cathal picked me up near Amiens Street station and instead of heading straight into the city centre he turned north, toward Binn's Bridge in Drumcondra. I asked why and he said only one thing, come on, I want you to meet someone before you meet Dublin properly. That someone turned out to be a bronze man sitting on a bench.

The bronze man at the second lock

Near the second lock on the Royal Canal, close to Dorset Street, there is a statue of the writer Brendan Behan, sitting with a blackbird turned toward him and three small triangles resting beside him on the bench. Most people who find it read the plaque, take a photograph, and walk on within a minute. Cathal stopped me before I could do the same and pointed down at the ground near the statue's boots. Someone had left an unopened can there.

He told me this happens on and off, quietly, without any organised effort, because Behan was as famous for his drinking as he was for his writing, and the can is a private joke the city keeps playing with itself. There is no plaque explaining it. His own uncle told him about it years ago, the same way his uncle had been told by someone older.

Cathal's uncle used to say Behan spent more hours being carried home from a pub than he ever spent sitting quietly at a desk, and Dublin still built him a bronze bench of his own beside the water he grew up next to.

The triangles are not decoration. They come from Behan's own song, The Auld Triangle, written about the sound a triangle made each morning in Mountjoy Prison to wake the men held there, not far from where we were standing. Behan had served time himself as a young man, arrested for republican activity while barely out of his teens, and he turned a grim prison routine into a song people now sing warmly in pubs. Once Cathal told me that, the statue stopped being a man relaxing by water and became something closer to a man finally free, permanently, on the same canal bank that once bordered his own cell.

The unwritten rule at the lock gates near Drumcondra

Walking further along the towpath, Cathal slowed me down at one of the narrow footbridges that cross the lock gates. He explained that regular walkers and runners along this stretch tend not to cross a working lock gate while it is actually in motion. Not because it is dangerous exactly, more because it is considered poor form among the people who use the waterway daily. You wait, you give a small nod to whoever is operating the gate, and you cross once it has settled.

Nobody has put up a sign about this. It is one of those things passed on by watching, and by being gently corrected as a child, which is exactly how his grandmother passed it on to him. Visitors who rush across mid operation tend to get a look, not hostile, just the quiet judgment locals save for people who have not yet learned a place's unwritten rules.

2.Touch the Rebuilt Stone at the Custom House

Do this: walk to the river side of the building, away from the main photo spot, and run your hand along the stone. Notice: the visibly different shade marks where 1921 fire damage was later rebuilt.

We came down toward the Liffey in the early afternoon, and the Custom House rose up ahead of us, all pale stone and a green dome. Everyone photographs it from the quay across the water. Cathal walked me right up to the base on the river side instead and told me to run my hand along a patch of stone that looked slightly darker and rougher than the rest.

In 1921, during the War of Independence, republican forces set fire to the building, and it burned for days, gutting most of the interior. When it was rebuilt, the replacement stone did not come from the same source as the original limestone, and if you know exactly where to look along the riverside face, you can still see sections that are a visibly different shade. Most guided tours mention the fire in a single sentence while moving a group along on a schedule. Almost none of them stop and let you actually find the mismatched stone with your own hand.

Cathal's grandmother remembered her own mother describing smoke that stayed visible over parts of the city for days, a story that had been handed down the way a family passes down a scar, everyone remembering exactly where it came from even generations later.

3.Look Up and Find the Fourteen River Gods on the Custom House

Do this: stand back from the building and scan the row of keystones above the ground floor windows on all four sides. Notice: the Lee keystone faces north instead of south toward Cork, sitting directly opposite the Liffey face.

Cathal made me stand back from the building entirely for this one, out near the middle of the quay, and pointed up at the row of carved stone faces sitting above the ground floor windows. There are fourteen of them running around all four sides of the building, each one a keystone carved by the sculptor Edward Smyth, and each one represents a different Irish river, along with a single face for the Atlantic Ocean.

Most visitors walk directly underneath these faces without ever tilting their head up, because nothing at ground level tells you they are there. Cathal knew which one was which the way some people know football squads, and he pointed out the keystone for the River Lee, carved as a stern man with an upturned anchor sitting on his head, two small ships loaded with barrels floating either side of him in his stone hair. Oddly, that particular face looks north rather than south toward Cork, which the river it represents would suggest, and it sits directly opposite the Liffey keystone on the far side of the building, a positioning historians read as Gandon and Smyth quietly signalling which two rivers mattered most to them.

On the north face of the building, away from the river entirely, four more figures represent Africa, America, Asia and Europe, a reminder that the Custom House was built as a working customs house for a global trade network, not just a monument to Ireland's own waterways. Cathal's own theory, which he admitted was entirely his own and not something his grandmother ever told him, was that nobody looks up anymore because phones keep everyone's eyes pointed forward and down.

4.Walk the Quiet Canal Stretch from Sheriff Street to Spencer Dock

Do this: continue the canal walk past the Convention Centre until you reach the old lifting bridge. Notice: the Luke Kelly head nearby honours the same singer who made Behan's own prison song famous.

We picked the canal back up much further down, closer to where it meets the Liffey near Spencer Dock and Sheriff Street. This stretch gets far fewer visitors than the section near the Custom House, mostly because it sits slightly off the obvious route between the main tourist sights, tucked behind old railway plaques and newer glass office blocks.

The head on the railing near Sheriff Street

There is a smaller sculpture here, easy to miss, a head resting near the water close to the old lifting bridge. It honours Luke Kelly, a folk singer from this part of the city who became known worldwide for performing the very same Auld Triangle that gave the Behan statue its bronze triangles. Cathal told me his grandmother once saw Luke Kelly perform in a small hall nearby, long before either sculpture existed, and she used to say the whole neighbourhood felt like it belonged to that one song for a while.

Standing between the Behan bench in Drumcondra and the Kelly head near Sheriff Street, several kilometres apart, you get a strange, quiet sense of how one piece of music stitched an entire stretch of a city together across generations, long before either man was cast in bronze.

5.Cross the City to Sit With Kavanagh on the Grand Canal

Do this: take a bus or walk across the city to Baggot Street Bridge and sit on the bench beside the statue for a few minutes. Notice: the same sculptor made both this statue and Behan's, for two writers who genuinely disliked each other.

Cathal took me across the city entirely, to the Grand Canal near Baggot Street Bridge, on the opposite side of Dublin from the Royal Canal and the Custom House. There, opposite what is now the Mespil Hotel, sits a bronze figure of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, seated on a bench near the water, hat tilted, looking as though he is mid thought rather than posing for anyone.

Locals call it the crank on the bank, a nickname Cathal delivered with real affection, the sort Dubliners reserve for things they secretly love making fun of. What he told me next was the detail that made the whole trip click into place. The same sculptor, a man named John Coll, made both the Kavanagh statue on the Grand Canal and the Behan statue on the Royal Canal, on opposite sides of the city, honouring two writers who by every account genuinely could not stand each other.

Kavanagh once denied under oath in court that he was even friendly with Behan, only for a book Kavanagh himself had signed for him to be produced as evidence, undoing the denial in front of everyone present.

Cathal explained that both men drank in the same handful of pubs, including one called McDaid's, and both were regulars at a small bookshop nearby, yet by most accounts treated each other as rivals for most of their working lives. Knowing that turns a simple pair of postcard statues into something closer to a decades old argument that Dublin quietly memorialised in bronze, on two different canals, without ever forcing the two men to share a single bench.

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6.Buy the Lemon Soap at Sweny's Pharmacy

Do this: step inside, buy a bar of the lemon soap, and stay if volunteers are reading Joyce aloud that afternoon. Notice: they still sell the exact soap Leopold Bloom buys in Ulysses.

Tucked on a corner near Trinity College, Sweny's looks like a chemist frozen in the 1850s, dark wood shelves, old apothecary bottles, nothing modern anywhere. Cathal brought me here almost apologetically, saying it was the one stop that was not really his family's story at all, it belonged to every Dubliner who ever studied Ulysses in school. Leopold Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap here in the novel, and the shop still sells that same lemon soap today, wrapped by hand by volunteers who also read passages of Joyce aloud most afternoons for anyone who wanders in.

Cathal's own memory of the place had nothing to do with Joyce. His mother used to send him in as a child for cough drops, and he only learned decades later that the small, slightly shabby shop he associated with a sore throat was the same one thousands of tourists cross the city specifically to see.

7.Find the Reading Cages Inside Marsh's Library

Do this: walk to the back wall of the library and look for the three small wired alcoves built into the woodwork. Notice: readers were once locked into these cages while handling the rarest volumes.

Beside St Patrick's Cathedral sits Marsh's Library, the oldest public library in Ireland, largely unchanged since it opened in the early 1700s. Cathal walked me straight to the back, past the rows of dark wooden shelving, to three small wired alcoves built into the far wall. He explained that readers using especially rare or valuable volumes used to be locked inside these cages while they read, not to punish them, but because book theft was common enough that the library needed a physical solution rather than a polite request.

Almost nobody visiting notices the cages unless someone points them out, since they blend into the woodwork from a distance. Once you know what they are, the whole room feels less like a quiet reading hall and more like a small, elegant vault built entirely out of trust and its limits.

8.Visit Tom and Jerry in the Christ Church Crypt

Do this: head down into the crypt and find the small glass case before you look at anything else in the treasury. Notice: James Joyce himself referenced this exact mummified cat and rat in Finnegans Wake.

In the largest cathedral crypt in Ireland or Britain, beneath Christ Church near Dublin Castle, sits a small glass case most visitors walk straight past on their way to the medieval stonework. Inside it are the mummified remains of a cat and a rat, found stuck together in an organ pipe in the 1850s, apparently trapped mid chase for who knows how long before anyone found them. Locals nicknamed the pair Tom and Jerry, and James Joyce himself worked a line about them into Finnegans Wake.

Cathal's grandmother used to bring him here as a child specifically for this case, skipping most of the treasury exhibits entirely, because she said a nine year old remembers a mummified cat and rat far longer than he remembers a silver chalice, and she was right, since it was the one thing in the whole cathedral he could describe to me from memory before we even arrived.

9.Stand Over the Buried Viking City at Wood Quay

Do this: stand outside the plain civic offices near Christ Church and look down rather than up. Notice: an entire Viking settlement sits beneath the pavement here, thanks to a protest that failed to stop construction but changed Irish law.

Beneath the grey civic offices near Christ Church lies one of the most contested patches of ground in modern Dublin history. In the 1970s, construction here uncovered the remains of the original Viking settlement, and thousands of Dubliners marched in protest to try to stop the building work from paving over it. Cathal's grandfather was reportedly one of them, standing in the crowd on a weekday afternoon rather than at work, something the family still brings up at gatherings with a mix of pride and mild disbelief.

The buildings went ahead regardless, but the protest itself changed how Ireland treats archaeological finds in the years since. Walking past the plain concrete offices today, it is easy to have no idea that an entire Viking town sits beneath the pavement, unless someone who actually knows the story stops you and tells you to look down rather than up for once.

10.Slip Into the Secret Garden at Iveagh Gardens

Do this: find the unmarked gate a few minutes from Grafton Street and walk in without expecting a crowd. Notice: some lifelong Dubliners have never actually stepped inside this park.

A short walk from the crowds on Grafton Street, behind an unassuming gate, sits one of the quietest green spaces in the city centre. Iveagh Gardens rarely appears on the standard list of Dublin parks, mostly because its entrances are easy to miss if you are not already looking for them. Cathal called it the secret garden without a hint of exaggeration, since even some Dubliners he knows have never actually been inside.

Inside, there is a sunken lawn, a small maze, a rustic grotto, and a fountain, all sitting within a few minutes of one of the busiest shopping streets in the country, yet somehow holding onto a stillness that Stephen's Green nearby has long since lost to crowds.

11.Browse the Stalls and Look Up at George's Street Arcade

Do this: browse the stalls, then stop in the middle of the aisle and look straight up. Notice: the Victorian ironwork roof is what most shoppers walk under without ever seeing.

A red brick Victorian market hall on South Great George's Street, this arcade has survived fires, changing fashions, and decades of nearby redevelopment while somehow keeping its original character intact. Cathal's aunt used to run a small stall here selling secondhand records, and he spent long Saturday afternoons as a teenager sitting behind her table doing homework between customers.

What he wanted me to notice was not any single shop, but the roofline itself, the ironwork and glass that let daylight pour into the aisles even in the middle of a grey Dublin afternoon, something most shoppers never look up to appreciate while they are focused on the stalls at eye level.

12.Get Fooled by the Optical Trick at the Casino at Marino

Do this: walk a full circle around the outside first and guess how many rooms it holds, then go in and check. Notice: from outside it looks like one small room, inside it hides a maze of staircases and chimneys.

On the northside, tucked into a quiet residential area, sits a small neoclassical building that looks, from a distance, like a single grand room. Walk closer and it turns out to be an elaborate optical trick, a compact building disguised to look even smaller and simpler than it actually is, with hidden chimneys, false doors, and internal staircases folded cleverly out of sight. It was built in the 1700s as a garden retreat and somehow survived being nearly demolished more than once.

Cathal only found out it existed when a school tour brought his class there, and he remembered being genuinely confused walking inside, since nothing about the exterior prepared him for how much space and how many hidden rooms were folded into what looked, from the street, like a single ordinary garden building.

13.Hike Up to the Hellfire Club on Montpelier Hill

Do this: make the climb up Montpelier Hill on a clear afternoon and turn around at the top before going inside the ruin. Notice: legend aside, this doubles as one of the best free viewpoints over the whole city.

South of the city, on a hill overlooking Dublin, sits the ruined stone shell of a hunting lodge with a genuinely dark reputation attached to it. Local legend holds that a club met here in the 1700s for gambling and drinking sessions that grew increasingly wild reputation wise, with stories over the centuries adding devils, card games with the devil himself, and a fire that supposedly could not be put out with water. None of it is provable, and most historians treat the darker legends as later exaggeration, but the stories persist regardless.

Cathal's family never actually told him ghost stories about the place directly, since none of them lived close enough to it growing up. What he did know was the hike up to it, a popular weekend walk for Dubliners wanting a view over the whole city, which meant the ruin's genuinely eerie reputation mattered less to most locals than the fact that it doubles as one of the better free viewpoints anywhere near the city.

14.Walk the Great South Wall Out to Poolbeg Lighthouse

Do this: walk or cycle the full length of the wall out to the lighthouse rather than turning back early. Notice: far enough out, Dublin stops feeling like a place you are standing inside and becomes a skyline instead.

Stretching far out into Dublin Bay is a long stone sea wall leading to a small red lighthouse, one of the longest sea walls of its kind anywhere. Locals walk or cycle its length regularly, treating it as a kind of open air corridor away from traffic and crowds, with the two enormous red and white striped chimneys of the Poolbeg power station looming behind for most of the walk.

Cathal told me his father used to fish off the rocks near the wall's base on Sunday mornings, a small ritual that had nothing to do with catching anything in particular and everything to do with getting out of the house early before the rest of the family woke up. He said half the appeal of the wall, even now, is that it takes you far enough from the city that Dublin itself becomes a skyline rather than a place you are standing inside.

15.Leave Your Mark on the Windmill Lane Wall

Do this: bring a marker and add your own line to the wall if you want, since almost everyone does eventually. Notice: the wall is repainted constantly by visitors, so it never looks the same twice.

Near the docks sits a stretch of wall covered in decades of layered graffiti, tributes, and messages left by fans of U2, who recorded some of their earliest work at a studio on this street. The studio itself has moved on, but the wall keeps being repainted over by new visitors leaving their own messages, layer over layer, a kind of living scrapbook that never stays the same for long.

Cathal was mildly embarrassed to admit that he had added something to the wall himself as a teenager, though he refused to tell me what, only that it involved a girl he liked at the time and was, in his own words, deeply cringeworthy in hindsight.

16.Feed the Ducks at Blessington Street Basin

Do this: walk in through the gate behind the terraced housing and sit by the water for a while, most visitors do not know to look for it. Notice: nothing about the surrounding streets hints that a reservoir sits just behind the house fronts.

Hidden behind ordinary terraced housing on the northside is a small, still reservoir that once supplied drinking water to the city, now quietly repurposed as a tiny wildlife park. Almost nobody outside the immediate neighbourhood seems to know it exists, since nothing about the surrounding streets hints at water sitting just behind the house fronts.

Cathal's grandmother lived close enough to walk here most evenings, and she used to bring him as a small child to feed the ducks, a habit he kept up occasionally as an adult, mostly, he admitted, because sitting beside water that nobody else seems to know about still felt like a small private privilege even decades later.

17.Find Bram Stoker's Birthplace in Clontarf

Do this: walk the residential street in Clontarf and find the small plaque on an otherwise ordinary house. Notice: Stoker was bedridden and unable to walk until around age seven, raised on his mother's stories of real cholera outbreaks.

A plain terraced house near the coast in Clontarf carries a small plaque marking the birthplace of Bram Stoker, the writer behind Dracula. There is nothing dramatic about the building itself, no gothic flourishes, just an ordinary Victorian house on an ordinary residential street, which is exactly what made it interesting to Cathal.

He pointed out that Stoker spent a sickly, bedridden childhood in this house, largely unable to walk until he was around seven years old, listening to his mother's stories about disease and death during the cholera outbreaks she had lived through. Cathal's own theory, shared half seriously, was that a horror writer raised on real stories of plague and confinement makes considerably more sense than one who simply had a vivid imagination.

18.Climb Around the Diving Bell on the Quays

Do this: walk the boardwalk near the Custom House and stop at the squat riveted structure most people walk straight past. Notice: it was actually used to help build the docks, not placed there as art.

Sitting almost unnoticed on the boardwalk near the Custom House is a squat, riveted metal structure that most passersby assume is some kind of decorative sculpture. It is in fact a real diving bell, once used to help construct the docks nearby, lowered into the water so workers could carry out repairs below the surface in relatively dry conditions.

Cathal told me his great uncle had worked briefly on the docks in his youth and always claimed, with no way for anyone to verify it, that he had gone down in that exact bell once as a young labourer. Whether it was true or family embellishment, Cathal said, hardly mattered anymore, since the story had been repeated so many times it had become as solid a part of the family history as anything actually documented.

19.Descend Into the Vaults at St Michan's Church

Do this: take the short vault tour on Church Street rather than skipping straight to the bigger cathedrals. Notice: the bodies here are naturally mummified, not embalmed, purely because of the dry limestone air trapped in the vaults.

Beneath an ordinary looking church on the northside, a set of underground vaults holds several centuries old bodies that have mummified naturally rather than through any deliberate process, preserved by a rare combination of dry air and the limestone the vaults are cut into. One is popularly known as the crusader, though the dating on that claim is shaky at best. Cathal's father used to say the vaults were the one Dublin attraction that genuinely unsettled him as a child, more than any ghost story anyone ever told him, because nothing about it was fiction.

20.Spot Oscar Wilde Reclining in Merrion Square

Do this: cross the square to the corner opposite Wilde's childhood home and look for the multicoloured stone up close. Notice: locals call it the quare on the square.

Reclining on a large rock at the corner of Merrion Square, opposite the house Wilde grew up in, is a statue made from several different types of stone, giving him a faintly multicoloured, almost mischievous look that suits the writer rather well. Cathal told me Dubliners commonly call it the quare on the square, said with the same fondness as the crank on the bank across the city. His own school ran a trip here once specifically so a teacher could read Wilde's short stories aloud on the grass nearby, a memory he said had stuck with him far longer than most of what he actually learned in the classroom that year.

21.Stand Where Handel's Messiah Premiered on Fishamble Street

Do this: walk the short, unremarkable street near the Liffey and find the small plaque between the car park and the office block. Notice: the world premiere of Handel's Messiah happened here in 1742, not in a grand concert hall.

A quiet, narrow street near the Liffey carries a small plaque marking the site where Handel's Messiah received its first ever public performance in 1742, in a music hall that no longer exists. Nothing about the street today hints at that history, which is exactly what Cathal wanted me to notice, since the actual site of one of the most performed pieces of music in the world sits between a car park and an office block with barely a tourist in sight.

22.Go See the Wild Deer Herd in Phoenix Park

Do this: cycle or walk deep enough into the park that the traffic noise disappears, then look for the herd grazing in the open. Notice: the deer have roamed freely here since the 1660s, older than most of the buildings around it.

One of the largest enclosed city parks in Europe holds a herd of wild fallow deer that has lived there since the 1660s, predating almost every building currently standing nearby. Cathal's family used to cycle out here on Sunday mornings, and he said the strange part was never the deer themselves but how quickly you forget you are still inside a capital city once you are a few minutes into the park, with the noise of the streets gone completely.

Planning the walk yourself

Facts worth keeping

By the time we had gone from a canal bench in Drumcondra to a diving bell on the quays, I understood something Cathal put simply. He said a city does not really open up to you through its landmarks. It opens up through the small habits nobody bothers to write down, a can left at a statue's feet, a cage built to stop a book thief, a wall repainted every year by strangers, a bell his great uncle may or may not have actually climbed into. Those are the things his grandmother, his mother, his uncles and his own patchy memory gave him without ever calling it a lesson, and those are the things he gave to me without ever calling it a tour.