Qualla: Dún Laoghaire

Dún Laoghaire: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerald England, CC BY-SA 2.0. It took forty-two years to build the harbour. Two granite piers, each over a kilometre long, curved out into Dublin Bay to enclose what is still one of the largest artificial harbours in Ireland. The men who quarried the stone from Dalkey a few miles up the coast, who fitted each cubic block by hand, who watched a generation of their working lives disappear into the sea wall -- they were building a refuge from a single disaster. On the night of 18-19 November 1807, two troopships, the Prince of Wales and the Rochdale, were driven onto rocks between Blackrock and Dun Laoghaire in a winter gale. Nearly four hundred soldiers and crew drowned within sight of land. The scandal that followed convinced Parliament that Dublin Bay needed an asylum harbour. The town that grew around the works went by three names in a century: Dunleary, then Kingstown after George IV's 1821 visit, then -- in 1920, on the eve of independence -- the original Irish form Dun Laoghaire, the fort of Loegaire.

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Image: Gerald England | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dún Laoghaire: The Fort of Laoghaire

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name reaches back fifteen centuries. Loegaire mac Neill -- pronounced 'Leery', anglicised over the centuries to Dunleary -- was a 5th-century High King who used the headland here as a sea base for raids on Britain and Gaul. Some of the original fortification stone is kept in ...

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Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dún Laoghaire: Ireland's First Railway

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NTF30, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 17 December 1834, six and a half miles of standard-gauge track opened between Dublin's Westland Row and the old Dunleary harbour. It was Ireland's first railway. Tickets cost a shilling first class, sixpence third. The journey took 15 minutes. Within a decade the line had been...

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Image: NTF30 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dún Laoghaire: The Mailboat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Carlisle Kid, CC BY-SA 2.0. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Dun Laoghaire was Ireland's principal passenger ferry port. The Holyhead route across the Irish Sea -- 80 nautical miles to North Wales -- carried millions: tourists, emigrants, soldiers, civil servants on transfer. The Carlisle Pier, exte...

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Image: The Carlisle Kid | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dún Laoghaire: Joyce's Disappointed Bridge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit איתן6, CC BY 3.0. James Joyce opens Ulysses on a Martello tower in Sandycove, on the coast immediately south of Dun Laoghaire. Buck Mulligan shaves on the roof, the sea below is 'snotgreen' and 'scrotumtightening', and the day that will become twentieth-century literature begins. Joyce had actuall...

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Image: איתן6 | CC BY 3.0

Dún Laoghaire: The Water Wag

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC BY-SA 4.0. Yachting in Dun Laoghaire is a serious matter. Four major sailing clubs -- the Royal St George Yacht Club, the Royal Irish, the National, and the Irish Youth Sailing Club -- line the harbour, several dating from the 1830s and 1840s. The 820-berth Dun Laoghaire Marina, opened in 2...

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Image: Ridiculopathy | CC BY-SA 4.0