Is Temple Bar really that bad? An honest answer
The question I get asked most often
“Should I avoid Temple Bar?” It’s the thing people ask after reading the travel forums, after someone in a Dublin Facebook group has posted the receipt for a €12 pint, after a friend returned from a bachelorette weekend and reported that the streets smelled of spilled beer and disappointment. The consensus online is that Temple Bar is a tourist trap, full stop, and any money spent there is money extracted from your pocket by a well-practised machine.
The honest answer is more complicated than that, and I think the blanket warning does a disservice to some things there that are genuinely worth seeing.
What the criticism gets right
The prices in the prominent pub-restaurants are genuinely high. Not London-high, but significantly above what you pay ten minutes away. A pint in the Quays Bar, the Oliver St. John Gogarty or the Palace Bar’s busiest hours costs more than the same Guinness in almost any other part of the city. The food in the tourist-facing places is mid-range quality at above-mid-range prices. The music in some venues is performed for visitors rather than played for itself, and the difference is audible.
The street itself — the cobbled main drag between Dame Street and the Liffey — is visually attractive but often physically unpleasant: stag parties from Liverpool and Edinburgh, hen parties in matching sashes, people whose relationship with the evening has already become complicated by 6pm. On a Friday or Saturday night in summer, Temple Bar proper is best avoided unless you are specifically part of one of these groups.
The ATMs charge transaction fees. The shops sell shamrock tat. The “traditional Irish pub” experiences photographed in guidebooks are largely designed for the photograph rather than the drink.
All of this is true and worth saying.
What the criticism gets wrong
Temple Bar the neighbourhood — the wider Cultural Quarter as it was designated in the 1990s — is not the same as the few blocks of pub-heavy commercial streets that tourists photograph. The neighbourhood includes the Irish Film Institute, the Gallery of Photography, the Project Arts Centre, the Ark children’s cultural centre, a good food market on Saturdays, and several streets of genuinely interesting small shops, studios, and restaurants that have nothing to do with the stag-party economy.
The Saturday Temple Bar Food Market in Meeting House Square is one of Dublin’s best markets. It runs from 10am to 4:30pm and has independent food producers selling cheese, bread, hot food, produce and speciality items at normal prices. The square itself is used for outdoor film screenings in summer. None of this appears in the warning posts.
There are also several pubs in and around Temple Bar that are not overpriced tourist traps. The Porterhouse on Nassau Street (technically just adjacent) brews its own beer and has reasonable prices. The Norseman on Essex Street East has been a local pub longer than Temple Bar existed as a marketing concept. The Foggy Dew on Fownes Street, Mulligan’s just off the main drag — these are pubs that serve Dubliners as well as visitors.
The pubs worth going to anyway
Even the prominent tourist pubs are not uniformly terrible. The Palace Bar on Fleet Street — genuinely old, pressed-tin ceiling, dark wood, walls lined with framed newspapers — is worth a drink on a quiet afternoon. Go at noon rather than nine in the evening, sit at the bar, and you have something close to the real thing. The Stag’s Head on Dame Lane (a few steps from Temple Bar) is one of the finest Victorian pub interiors in the country. Go there. Just avoid it on a Friday after 8pm.
The music question is where the criticism sometimes oversimplifies. Some of the traditional music sessions in Temple Bar pubs are tourist-facing and feel performative. But the distinction between a genuine session and a performed one is not always geographic — there are good traditional sessions in pubs all over Dublin, and some of them are close to Temple Bar. The traditional pub walking tour takes you to pubs where the music is played for its own sake, including some in the Temple Bar area — a better way to find them than wandering in off the street.
How to use Temple Bar well
Walk through it in the daytime before the evening economy takes over. The architecture is worth seeing — the narrow streets, the Dutch Billy buildings, the variety of eras layered in a few blocks. Visit the Irish Film Institute for a film or a coffee; the café is excellent and you are sitting in a beautiful building. Go to the food market on Saturday morning. Walk down to the Ha’penny Bridge and the Liffey boardwalk.
Then, for your evening, leave. The pubs I’d point you to for atmosphere, price and actual drink quality are in the Liberties, around Stoneybatter and Smithfield, or on the Northside around Parnell Square. The local pub guide covers this in more detail.
If you are staying in Temple Bar — and a lot of good hotels are located there — the question is not whether to go to the main street pubs but whether to stay in them for the evening. I wouldn’t. Walk ten minutes in almost any direction and you will find better value, better pints, and people who are there because they want to be rather than because they followed a map pin.
The final verdict
Temple Bar is not as bad as the forums say. It is also not as good as the guidebook photographs imply. It is a neighbourhood that contains a genuine tourist trap at its commercial core, some genuinely worthwhile cultural venues and a food market on its quieter edges, and a few pubs that are worth visiting at the right time of day. The key information the “avoid it entirely” posts miss is that Temple Bar the experience is very much about when and where within it you go.
Go there in the morning. Explore the Film Institute and the side streets. Leave before the coaches arrive. Come back on Saturday for the market. That version of Temple Bar is good. The version you find at 9pm on a summer Friday is what the forums are warning you about, and on that, they are right.
