Qualla: Rathmines

Rathmines: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Gargan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four clock faces. Four different times. The clock tower on Rathmines Town Hall has been telling the wrong hour - in four directions simultaneously - for so long that Dubliners have given it a name. The Four Faced Liar. Walk south from the Grand Canal up Rathmines Road and the green copper dome of the Mary Immaculate church appears first, then the cream stone of the Town Hall with its lying clock. Underneath that genteel Victorian skin lies a suburb whose history involves a copper church dome originally bound for St. Petersburg, a battle that may have decided the fate of Ireland, and a generation of young civil servants who knew it simply as Flatland.

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

Image: Oliver Gargan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathmines: Two August 1649

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Djm-leighpark, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Battle of Rathmines was fought on 2 August 1649 between Royalist forces under the Marquess of Ormonde and Parliamentary troops besieged inside Dublin under Michael Jones. Up to five thousand died in a single afternoon - a casualty figure comparable to Naseby in the English Ci...

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

Image: Djm-leighpark | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathmines: Dublin's Belgravia

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Metro Centric, CC BY 2.0. Rathmines became the place wealthy Dubliners moved when they wanted distance from the city's deteriorating Georgian core. The Rathmines Township, established by Act of Parliament in 1847, eventually absorbed Rathgar, Ranelagh, Sallymount and Milltown into a kind of self-governing...

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

Image: Metro Centric | CC BY 2.0

Rathmines: The Dome Meant for Russia

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander P Kapp, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners Church - a neoclassical Catholic church with a Roman portico - rises on the western side of Rathmines Road. Its current green copper dome arrived in Dublin in 1922 by accident of history. The original dome had burned in a 1920 fire that star...

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

Image: Alexander P Kapp | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rathmines: Flatland

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 27tintin, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the 1930s onward those great Georgian and Victorian houses began to be subdivided. The single-family terraces of Leinster Road and Grosvenor Square became bedsits and small flats, rented to civil servants newly arrived in Dublin, country girls training as nurses or teachers,...

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

Image: 27tintin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathmines: A Liar Still Lying

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Modern Rathmines still hums. The Swan cinema was rebuilt in 2014 into a multiplex with eight screens; the vintage Stella was restored in 2017 to show classics in a single auditorium. St Mary's College on Rathmines Road has produced multiple Ireland rugby internationals, including...

Read more: Rathmines on Qualla

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