Traditions of Dublin
The Irish capital, where St Patrick's festival, Bloomsday and the pub session carry the culture.
Dublin, on the River Liffey, is a city of literature, music and talk. Irish traditions of storytelling, trad music, step dance and hospitality have spread around the world through emigrants. St Patrick's Day, on 17 March, is celebrated with a parade and a festival, and the pub is a place of tune and conversation.
Sessions and Bloomsday
A traditional session sees fiddles, pipes and bodhráns in a pub with players taking turns to lead tunes. On Bloomsday, on 16 June, readers follow the path of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses, in Edwardian clothes, eating a breakfast of kidney. At Hallowe'en, which began in Ireland as Samhain, families eat barmbrack with a ring baked inside.
At the table
A full Irish breakfast, soda bread, colcannon of cabbage and potato, Irish stew, and a pint of stout are common. Boxty, a potato pancake, and coddle, a sausage and bacon stew, are Dublin foods. Tea is drunk strong with milk. A cup is always offered to visitors.
Signature traditions of Dublin
A trail idea for Dublin
- Temple Bar Hear music in the pubs.
- Trinity College Library See the Book of Kells.
- Moore Street Walk the old market.
Written by the EveryParampara desk with AI assistance. Opening hours, markets and festival dates change; check locally before travelling. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
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Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Beltane: Stefan Schäfer, Lich, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- May Day: Bryan Ledgard, CC BY 2.0, source
- Bloomsday: No machine-readable author provided. Flapdragon assumed (based on copy, Public domain, source
- Saint Patrick's Day: rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid ( coṁrá ), CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Samhain: Daniel Maclise, Public domain, source
- Irish traditional music: Gtapp, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Barmbrack: Solo Beckett, CC BY-SA 4.0, source