Conway's, Dublin — A Lost Old Pub

What happened

Conway's stood at 70 Parnell Street, across the road from the Rotunda, and generations of Dublin men waited in it for word from the maternity hospital — the errand Roddy Doyle gave a character in The Snapper. The pub's claim was 1745, and the national broadcaster's archive repeats it: reporting the sale of the house in a television item of February 1982, it says there has been a pub on the site since that year. What the record holds is later and plainer. The national inventory of architectural heritage dates the standing building to about 1880 and records its original use as a public house — a four-storey corner block in red brick with a timber shopfront, fluted pilasters and cast-iron cresting. That is evidence of drink sold there in the 1880s and says nothing either way about the 1740s. The site is also where Pádraig Pearse surrendered in 1916. Conway's lost its licence and closed in February 2008; by April the Irish Times was reporting a legal dispute over its proposed sale. It has not opened since.

What is there now

Shut, shuttered and argued over. The ground floor has been closed since 2008 and the upper three storeys boarded since 2022 by Hammerson, the property group that bought the site in 2016 and folded the pub's restoration into a scheme running from O'Connell Street to Moore Street. Dublin City Council put the building on its buildings-at-risk register, opened a live endangerment file in February 2025 and was assessing it for the derelict sites register, which would bring an annual levy of seven per cent of market value. It remains a protected structure, and the ornate shopfront is the part deteriorating fastest.

Sources

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