4 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest pub in Dublin is the Brazen Head on Lower Bridge Street, which dates itself to 1198. By evidence it is the same house on a much later date: a property called the Brazen Head is documented in 1613, an ale licence follows in 1661, it is described as an inn by 1668, and the building standing there now was finished about 1754. No house here has an earlier record than that 1613 property, the first record of drink anywhere on this page is the 1661 licence, and not one of these pubs can produce a document from the year on its sign.
Dublin is the hardest city on this site to date, and the reason is not that its pubs are young. The Public Record Office burned at the Four Courts in 1922 and took the deeds and wills that would settle these arguments with it, so what is left to check a Dublin claim against is usually a building, and a building in a city centre rebuilt twice over is the one thing that does not survive. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage has surveyed two of the houses here and found late Victorian or Edwardian fabric in both — 1871 at the Bleeding Horse, about 1900 at the Norseman — while granting that each stands where something older stood. That is the shape of the evidence in this city: an old trade, carried on in new premises, recorded in documents that no longer exist. Read the houses here as separate arguments rather than as a ranking: the grade beside each one measures that pub against its own sign, and nothing else.
The Brazen Head near Christ Church carries the boldest date in Ireland after Sean’s Bar, and the interesting thing about it is not the 1198. It is that this is one of the very few Irish pubs with a paper trail at all: a property of the name in 1613, an ale licence in 1661, an inn by 1668, and a rebuilding finished about 1754 whose advertisement promised “neat accommodations and commodious cellars”. That sequence would be a strong claim to 1613 in any city in these islands. The pub advertises a date five centuries older instead, which is why the grade on this page is C while the pub is, on the evidence, the oldest thing on it. The fuller argument about Irish dates is in our look at Sean’s Bar.
Two of these houses have been examined by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, and in both cases the survey moved the date the wrong way for the pub and the right way for the reader. The Bleeding Horse at the top of Camden Street claims at least the seventeenth century, in wording identical to its Wikipedia article — the same source twice, not two sources — and the inventory dates the red-brick house standing there to a rebuilding of 1871, while allowing that an earlier inn was on the site. Sheridan Le Fanu had already written about “the genuine old Bleeding Horse” in 1845, so something of the name was there; how much older than Le Fanu is not established. The Norseman in Temple Bar dates its first licence to 1696 and describes a sixteenth-century tavern called the Wooden Man before that. The inventory puts its building at about 1900, finds the corner held by one tenant as a vintner’s in Thom’s Directory of 1862, and notes that Essex Street itself was not opened until 1674 — later than the tavern the pub describes.
The Hole in the Wall out at Blackhorse Avenue is the honest outlier: a hundred metres of rooms against the Phoenix Park wall, a claim to 1651 under an older sign, and nothing traceable behind either. Its own best story is its name, and that one is nineteenth-century and plausible — soldiers from the barracks nearby served through an opening in the park wall. A pub can be worth the walk without being medieval, which is the argument this whole site is making. For the rest of the country, including the house with the firmest record in it — Kyteler’s Inn in Kilkenny, an inn on paper from 1639 — see the oldest pubs in Ireland; for how a story is weighed against a record, see our methodology.
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Dublin, County Dublin
No record supports 1198. A property called the Brazen Head is documented in 1613 (Richard Fagan), an ale licence in 1661 and use as an inn by 1668; the present building was completed around 1754. The 1668 has a second reading behind it now: John Thomas Gilbert, in his History of the City of Dublin, written from the city's own records in the 1850s, says that the Brazen Head was an inn located from the year 1668 in a
Dublin, County Dublin
The pub says the house goes back at least to the seventeenth century, when this was St Kevin's Port, and offers two accounts of the name: a farrier who bled horses at the inn, and a horse wounded at the Battle of Rathmines in 1649. The wording on its site is the Wikipedia article's, word for word, so those two are one source and not two. The independent record is the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
Dublin, County Dublin
The 1651 and the name Ye Signe of Ye Blackhorse are published by Visit Dublin, and a travel guide says the pub's own history is where the year comes from; no primary document was found and nothing the pub publishes was traced. The present name dates from the late 1800s, when drink was reportedly passed to soldiers through a gap in the park wall.
Dublin, County Dublin
The pub's own account gives 1696 as the year the premises was first licensed, and says the house sold drink from the 1500s as the Wooden Man Tavern, named for a carved Viking figure on the corner. Neither statement has been traced to a record. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, read again on 18 September 2026 from the survey's published data rather than from an archived copy of its web page, dates the
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