Merrion Square
In 1792 a duke sailed a boat through flooded streets to this corner; fifty years later the same square fed the famine-starving from soup kitchens.
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Three sides lined with largely original 18th-century Georgian redbrick townhouses — all but one surviving from the era — ring a free public park with a layered social history: aristocrats abandoned the northside to settle here, and the west edge puts Leinster House, Government Buildings, the Natural History Museum, and the National Gallery in a single eyeline.
What to look for
- Georgian redbrick townhouses on three sides — all original 18th-century except where the 1930s National Maternity Hospital replaced Antrim House
- The west side view: Leinster House (seat of the Oireachtas), Government Buildings, the Natural History Museum, and the National Gallery lined up together
- The central garden, which held famine soup kitchens in the 1840s and was designed from competition-winning drawings in 1792
The central railed garden is a public park — no entry fee.
Merrion Square is one of 35 sights worth the detour in Dublin, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Dublin pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Dublin
- Aviva StadiumOne 51,711-seat bowl jointly owned by rugby and football — two governing bodies, one ground, no separate home for either.
- Dublin CastleThe river that gave Dublin its name still flows beneath your feet — and the building above it ran Ireland for 750 years.
- Croke ParkThe fourth-largest stadium in Europe holds 82,300 people — almost entirely for sports most of the world has never watched.
- National Library of IrelandIreland's paper memory — manuscripts, photographs, and newspapers free to open on the spot.
- St Patrick's CathedralIreland's national cathedral has never had a bishop — that role belongs to the rival church 400 metres up the road.
- Spire of DublinA 120-metre stainless-steel pin planted on the exact spot where an IRA bomb in 1966 — and a controlled demolition six days later — erased Nelson's Pillar.