Dublin Docklands

A neighbourhood rebuilt from the water up

Dublin’s docklands is the clearest example in the city of how quickly a formerly derelict area can be transformed. Twenty years ago, the north and south quays east of the Samuel Beckett Bridge were a mix of disused warehouses, bonded stores and underused industrial land. Today the north docklands is home to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other technology companies — it is sometimes called “Silicon Docks” — alongside new apartment towers, a park on the site of the old North Docks, and two of Dublin’s most important historical attractions: the EPIC Museum and the Jeanie Johnston famine ship.

The architecture of the docklands is mixed. The Samuel Beckett Bridge itself, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2009, is the most elegant structure in the area, a cable-stayed bridge shaped like a harp. The surrounding office buildings are of variable quality. But the waterfront walk from the Samuel Beckett Bridge east to the Point Depot is a genuinely pleasant half-hour with views across the Liffey and plenty of activity.

EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum

EPIC opened in 2016 in the vaults of a nineteenth-century bonded warehouse called CHQ. It is Ireland’s only museum dedicated entirely to the story of Irish emigration — the millions who left the country over three centuries, driven by famine, poverty, political persecution, and later by ambition and opportunity.

The museum works in a format of themed rooms, each covering a different aspect of the emigration story: the Famine of the 1840s, which killed approximately one million people and sent another million overseas in five years; the waves of emigration that followed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Irish diaspora’s impact on culture, politics and sport in America, Australia, Britain and elsewhere; and the contemporary story of the 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish heritage.

The production quality is high — immersive media, well-curated objects, accessible narrative — and the emotional content is handled honestly without becoming mawkish. It is the kind of museum where visitors who thought they were just passing through end up staying two hours.

The EPIC Museum and Jeanie Johnston combo ticket is the most efficient way to visit both attractions in sequence, and the combination makes contextual sense — the museum tells the story, the ship shows the physical reality.

The Jeanie Johnston

Moored just outside the CHQ building, the Jeanie Johnston is a full-scale replica of a nineteenth-century sailing ship that carried emigrants from Ireland to North America during and after the Famine. The original ship made sixteen voyages between 1847 and 1858, carrying approximately 2,500 passengers without losing a single life to illness — an extraordinary record for the era, when “coffin ships” routinely lost significant proportions of their passengers to disease.

Guided tours of the ship take about 50 minutes and cover the conditions below deck, the diet, the medical care provided by the ship’s doctor, and the stories of specific passengers drawn from the ship’s records. The guides are knowledgeable and the experience of being below decks in a reconstructed emigrant hold is more affecting than you might expect. Combined with the EPIC Museum visit, it gives a complete and properly grounded understanding of what emigration from Ireland actually meant.

The waterfront and beyond

The area around Custom House Quay and Memorial Road has changed significantly since 2020. The Windmill Lane area (where U2’s first recording sessions took place) is marked by a painted mural wall that has become a photo stop. The Convention Centre Dublin, a glass cylinder by Kevin Roche, anchors the south end of the area.

The Liffey River cruise departs from the quays just west of the Ha’penny Bridge and gives a different angle on both the docklands development and the traditional quayside architecture. It runs about 45 minutes and is a relaxed complement to a docklands visit if you want to see the contrast between old and new from the water.

Getting there and combining with other stops

The docklands is easily reached from the city centre on foot (about twenty minutes from O’Connell Street along the quays) or by DART to Connolly Station (ten minutes walk south-west to CHQ). The Luas Red Line also passes through the area via the Mayor Square and Spencer Dock stops.

A natural pairing is a morning at the EPIC Museum and Jeanie Johnston, followed by lunch at one of the restaurants on Grand Canal Dock on the south side of the river (a ten-minute walk via the Samuel Beckett Bridge), and then an afternoon at Kilmainham or back through Temple Bar and O’Connell Street.

The docklands area also connects northward to Glasnevin Cemetery by bus, linking the EPIC’s emigration narrative to the burial place of the political figures who shaped the country the emigrants left — a thematic pairing worth considering for anyone doing a day focused on Irish history.