Irish revolution history walk: from 1913 to the Treaty and beyond

The decade that made modern Ireland

Between 1913 and 1923, Ireland went through a series of upheavals that transformed the island from the westernmost region of the British Empire into a partitioned island — the Irish Free State in the south and the Ulster Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland in the north. The speed and violence of the transformation, and its incompleteness (the Civil War ended in exhausted stalemate rather than resolution), shaped Irish society for the rest of the twentieth century.

The decade breaks into four distinct phases, all of which left physical marks on Dublin: the Labour crisis and Lockout of 1913; the Easter Rising of 1916; the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921; and the Civil War from 1922 to 1923. Each has associated sites in the city.

Where	O’Connell Street, the Liberties and Kilmainham
Cost	Free exterior sites; Kilmainham Gaol and GPO Museum have entry fees
Time needed	Half a day self-guided, 2 hours guided
Getting there	Central Dublin, walkable from Trinity College area
Booking	Kilmainham Gaol should be pre-booked, especially in summer

How to read this walk

Dublin does not present the revolutionary decade as a single trail. The sites are scattered across the Northside, the quays and the western edge of the city, and most of them are working buildings, shops, courts or streets rather than purpose-built museums. That is part of the appeal: you are standing where things happened, often with ordinary city life going on around you, and the history sits beside traffic, tourists and office workers.

It helps to decide before you set out whether you want chronology or geography. A chronological walk follows the story from the Lockout to the Civil War but means doubling back across the city. A geographical walk groups the sites by neighbourhood and tells the story in the order you meet them. Most visitors find the geographical approach far less tiring, and the guide below is written so that either works.

If you are building the walk into a wider stay, the O’Connell Street and Northside area guide gives the neighbourhood context, and the Dublin historical walking tour guide shows how this theme sits alongside the Viking, medieval and Georgian layers of the city.

The 1913 Lockout

The story often starts here rather than in 1916, because the Lockout was the confrontation that radicalised Irish labour and created the political conditions in which physical-force republicanism could recruit beyond its traditional base.

In August 1913, Dublin employers led by William Martin Murphy (a newspaper proprietor who also owned the tram network) locked out workers who had joined Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. The resulting standoff lasted until January 1914 and resulted in a defeat for the workers but a permanent place for Larkin and James Connolly in the iconography of Irish labour.

The key site is Liberty Hall on the quays, the union headquarters — the current building is a replacement for the original, which was shelled in 1916. A statue of Larkin stands on O’Connell Street, arms raised in the posture for which he was famous on the platform.

Standing at Liberty Hall, it is worth remembering how much of the later story grows out of this dispute. The Lockout produced the Irish Citizen Army, the small labour militia that later took part in the Rising, and it tied the cause of workers’ rights to the cause of national independence in a way that colours Irish politics to this day. Many of the families who suffered most in the tenements of the city had no interest in constitutional theory; they wanted food, wages and the right to organise. Keeping that in mind makes the later political drama easier to understand, because the Rising and the wars that followed were never only about flags and parliaments.

The Easter Rising — covered in detail

The events of Easter Week 1916 are covered fully in our 1916 Easter Rising guide. For the purposes of this walk, the key sites are: the GPO on O’Connell Street, the Four Courts, the College of Surgeons on St Stephen’s Green, and Kilmainham Gaol where the leaders were executed.

The Irish Revolution walking tour 1913–1923 covers all phases of the revolutionary decade, placing 1916 within the longer arc rather than treating it as an isolated event. This broader frame is important: the Rising was militarily unsuccessful and initially unpopular; it was the British response — specifically the executions — that transformed it into the founding myth of the state.

Seeing Kilmainham in context

Kilmainham Gaol is the emotional end point of the Rising story, and it lands harder if you have already walked the Northside first. By the time you stand in the prison yard you will have seen the headquarters building where the Rising was proclaimed and the streets the rebels retreated along, so the executions read as the end of a sequence rather than an isolated fact.

The Kilmainham Gaol guide covers the visit itself, and the Kilmainham and museums area guide is useful if you want to pair the prison with the other sites nearby. Because the gaol is visited by guided tour only and places are limited, the advice in our guide to booking Dublin attractions in advance applies here more than almost anywhere else in the city.

The War of Independence (1919–1921)

After Sinn Féin’s 1918 election landslide, elected MPs refused to take their seats at Westminster and instead constituted their own parliament (Dáil Éireann) in the Mansion House on Dawson Street in January 1919. On the same day, members of the Irish Volunteers killed two RIC officers in Tipperary — events later designated as the opening shots of the War of Independence.

The war was primarily a guerrilla campaign organised by Michael Collins from a series of safe houses across Dublin. Collins’s genius was intelligence: he ran an extensive spy network within the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the RIC, and the killing of British intelligence agents on Bloody Sunday (21 November 1920) demonstrated both his reach and the devastating British response (the Auxiliaries shot dead 14 civilians at a football match in Croke Park the same day).

Croke Park is an important site for this history — and it is still standing, still used for Gaelic games, with the GAA Museum inside. The Croke Park guide covers the context. The massacre site is memorialised within the stadium.

The Mansion House on Dawson Street, where the first Dáil met, is now the Lord Mayor’s residence and not generally open to visitors, but the exterior is worth seeing.

A point that surprises many visitors is how little of the War of Independence is marked in the physical city. Guerrilla warfare leaves few monuments: the safe houses were ordinary buildings, the meetings were secret, and the ambushes happened on streets that look much like any other today. This is why a guide who can point at an unremarkable doorway and explain what happened there adds so much. The Castle, the administrative heart of British rule, is the natural counterpart to these hidden sites, and our Dublin Castle guide explains what you can see inside the complex.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty and Civil War

The Treaty negotiations in London produced a deeply divided agreement: an Irish Free State with dominion status (not a republic), Northern Ireland excluded, and an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Collins signed it as “the best available” given British military superiority; de Valera rejected it. The Dáil narrowly ratified the Treaty in January 1922.

Civil war followed in June 1922 when pro-Treaty forces (the new National Army) attacked anti-Treaty forces holding the Four Courts. The subsequent shelling and fire destroyed the Public Record Office within the Four Courts, burning irreplaceable historical records. The Four Courts, which you can see from the Liffey quays, bears the marks of the 1922 battle in its architecture.

Michael Collins was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth in Cork on 22 August 1922. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, as are de Valera, Countess Markievicz, and many others from the revolutionary generation.

The Civil War is the hardest part of the decade to present, because it set former comrades against each other and left bitterness that lasted generations. Irish people often speak about it with more reluctance than about the Rising, and the political parties that dominated the Republic for decades traced their origins to opposite sides of the Treaty divide. Visitors who approach this chapter with curiosity rather than a search for heroes and villains tend to get the most out of it. The Four Courts is a good place to pause on the quays and simply look: the building is still a working courthouse, and the contrast between its calm exterior and the violence of 1922 is striking.

The Garden of Remembrance

Parnell Square North holds the Garden of Remembrance, a memorial to all those who died in the struggle for Irish independence. Designed by Daithi Hanly and opened by Éamon de Valera in 1966 (the 50th anniversary of the Rising), it occupies the site where captured rebels were held after the 1916 surrender before being taken to Kilmainham.

The centrepiece is the Children of Lir sculpture — the mythological transformation of children into swans, used here as a symbol of rebirth from suffering. This is where Queen Elizabeth II bowed her head in 2011 on her first visit to the Republic, in one of the most significant gestures in the history of Anglo-Irish relations.

Entry is free. Five minutes’ walk from the GPO on O’Connell Street.

Key sites at a glance

Site	What it covers	Time needed
GPO on O’Connell Street	1916 Rising headquarters	30–45 min (exterior + museum)
Kilmainham Gaol	Executions, guided tour	90 min (pre-book)
Four Courts	Civil War’s opening battle (exterior)	15 min
Garden of Remembrance	Memorial, Children of Lir sculpture	20 min
Glasnevin Cemetery	Graves of Collins, de Valera, Markievicz	60–90 min

Continuing the story at Glasnevin and the museums

For anyone who wants to go deeper than the street-level sites, Glasnevin Cemetery is where much of this history is literally buried — guided cemetery tours connect the graves directly to the events described above, and the visitor centre adds context that the walking sites alone cannot. The EPIC Emigration Museum in the Docklands takes a complementary angle, covering how the political upheaval of this decade fits into the much longer story of Irish emigration. Neither replaces the walking tour, but both add useful depth for a history-focused day.

Getting around between the sites

The Northside sites sit close together and are easy on foot, but the Four Courts, Kilmainham and Glasnevin are spread further apart, so a little planning saves energy. Our guide to getting around Dublin explains the options, and the Leap card guide is worth a look if you expect to hop on and off public transport several times in a day. If you prefer to link the sites on foot and want a map-led approach rather than a guide, the self-guided Dublin walk is a useful companion, and the Glasnevin and Drumcondra area guide helps you place the cemetery on the map.

Comfortable shoes matter more than anything else here. Dublin weather changes quickly, so carry a waterproof layer, and plan a coffee or lunch stop around the middle of the day to break up the history; the story is heavy and a pause helps it settle. The wider Dublin history buff itinerary shows how to space these heavier days against lighter ones.

Putting the decade in a wider frame

Visitors who enjoy this walk often want to understand what came before and around it. The long background of famine, emigration and land grievance shaped the political mood that made the revolution possible, and the Great Famine in Dublin guide is a natural companion read. Those who want the lighter, more literary side of the same period will find that the writers of the era were often in the same streets and cafés as the revolutionaries; the literary Dublin guide picks up that thread.

Whatever you choose to add, try to leave the walk with a sense of continuity rather than a list of dates. The revolution was made by people who knew each other, argued with each other and in some cases fought each other, and the city they left behind still carries those relationships in its street names, statues and memorials.

Planning a revolutionary history walk

A focused half-day might cover: Garden of Remembrance (free, 20 minutes) → GPO and O’Connell Street walk (45 minutes) → Four Courts exterior walk (15 minutes) → Kilmainham Gaol (guided tour, 90 minutes, pre-booked). Total: half a day with travel.

For a full day with more context, add Glasnevin Cemetery in the morning and the revolutionary sites in the afternoon.

The historic landmarks and revolution stories walking tour provides a guided two-hour version of the key O’Connell Street and Northside sites, a good complement to a self-guided afternoon at Kilmainham. For the complete history-focused trip, the Dublin history buff 3-day itinerary structures all of these sites across three days.

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