Thomas Moore Tavern, Wexford

The claim

A bar and bistro on the Cornmarket in the middle of Wexford, named for the poet Thomas Moore and dating itself, without a year, to the seventeen-hundreds, when the house was the King's Arms. There is a bar at the front, a restaurant and function rooms behind, music through the week and a trad and ballad session on Sunday afternoons.

What the records show

The tavern's own account, archived in January 2024, dates the house to the seventeen-hundreds, when it was the King's Arms, and heads the page "over 200 years of heritage". It gives no year, and we have traced no record of either name, so 1700 stands here only as the first year of the century the pub itself names. This page also said there was no architectural inventory entry for the building, and that was wrong. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, read through its open data on 17 September 2026, has record 15502020 on the Corn Market, mapped within a metre of the tavern: an attached three-bay four-storey house on a rectangular plan with a shopfront to the ground floor, a red brick Flemish bond wall to the front and rendered elevations elsewhere, cut-granite window sills under red brick voussoirs, recorded as extant by 1840. The survey gives its range as 1700 to 1840, which is the surveyors saying the house was standing when the town was first mapped in detail and that it could be as early as the eighteenth century. So the inventory neither confirms nor refutes the seventeen-hundreds, but it exists, it describes a substantial brick house on this corner, and the page should not have said otherwise. The tavern is called after the poet Thomas Moore, whose mother Anastasia Codd came from Wexford; the local tradition that this was her family's house is one we have not been able to source.

What to look for inside

Named for the poet Thomas Moore, whose mother came from Wexford
Earlier name, by the tavern's own account, the King's Arms

Visiting

Thomas Moore Tavern is in Wexford, Ireland, at Cornmarket, Wexford Y35 Y9VX. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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