“THE STORY OF Guinness is not just about the beer. It’s Guinness as a presence within Dublin, and within the Liberties.”
Eibhlin Colgan is the Archive Manager at Guinness. She is based in normal times at the famous complex behind the archway at St James’s Gate, where Guinness has been made since 1759. The iconic entranceway remains one of her favourite places at the brewery, as a reminder of Guinness’ role in shaping this area of the capital.
“There are stories about Arthur Guinness coming through, riding his horse into the brewery from his residence,” she says. “You can feel that when you look at the front gate, you are walking in somebody’s footsteps.”
Tomorrow will see the return of the Guinness In The Liberties Walking Tour, an annual fixture of St Patrick’s Festival. This year, however, it will be a little different – running as a virtual tour online as part of SPF TV. Viewers will be able to join Eibhlin Colgan and Dublin historian Donal Fallon of Three Castles Burning, as they trace two routes through the Liberties before meeting at the brewery gates.
Like many Dubliners, Fallon has a personal connection to the brewery and the Liberties area. “My grandfather worked for Guinness,” he says. “My granny would have grown up in Cornmarket,” where Thomas Street meets Christchurch, “until my family moved out to Ballyfermot in the 1950s. Back when it was known as Bally-far-out. They thought they were moving to the moon.”
The focus of this year’s tour is on that sense of community in the Liberties: its origins, and how it has shaped the area we see today. Fallon’s route starts at the old city walls on Thomas Street, and looks at some of the traces left by the area’s history.
“The Liberties has a deep industrial heritage: brewing, distilling, weaving. And in women’s labour history too, with street trading,” he says. “But brewing and distilling did particularly well.”
One of the stops on the tour is the famous windmill building that once formed part of Roe’s distillery, now in a car park behind a coffee shop in a shipping container.
“Historically, that part of Dublin was known as the Golden Triangle,” says Fallon. “Between Jameson in Smithfield, Roe’s and Powers. They were the Big Three of Dublin distilling.” The Powers copper pot stills, too, can still be seen on the old distillery site that is now NCAD.
Even aside from their physical traces, the neighbourhood’s industries played a significant role in shaping the built environment we see today. This ranges from the restoration of St Patrick’s Cathedral, financed by the Guinness family in the 1860s, to the community facilities built in what was historically an area of great deprivation.
“Back in 1890s, this was the poorest area of inner-city Dublin,” says Eibhlin Colgan. “The area that is now St Patrick’s Park would have been some of the worst slum housing. They say it was worse than Calcutta at the time, with these hovels built right up to the walls of the cathedral.”
Today’s landscape, with the green of the park alongside the redbrick Iveagh Buildings, was constructed by Guinness with an attentiveness to the needs of the community that was forward-thinking at the time.
“The Iveagh Buildings were social housing, you didn’t have to work in the brewery to live there,” says Colgan. But the overall vision wasn’t just housing. “It was the green spaces like the park. The Bayno was Ireland’s first creche; there were the Iveagh Baths; the Iveagh Markets on Francis Street. That was creating an indoor market – bringing street traders and their customers in from the cold, and putting a roof over their head. It was a creation of community.”
Of course, the employees of the brewery themselves were famously well cared for. “The joke in Guinness was that ‘from the womb to the tomb’, you were looked after,” says Fallon. In some cases, suggests Colgan, this may have been literally true. “Last year marked 150 years of the Guinness medical centre, which is still there on site,” she says. “My favourite part is that in 1901, with a completely male dominated workforce, the brewery employed a midwife to look after their wives during childbirth.”
But the legacy of Guinness in the Liberties extends beyond just that workforce and their families into a wider community. “I have a sense of it as something that became a part of people’s lives in the area,” says Fallon. “Some of that legacy, for example the Iveagh Markets and the Iveagh Buildings, was for the benefit of those who have no connection to Guinness. You didn’t have to have the pensionable job to benefit. It was unique in a city of so little industry.”
The virtual walking tour will air on SPF TV at 4pm on St Patrick’s Day. In this time when far fewer people than normal are travelling into Dublin city centre, Fallon hopes that the virtual tour will help us to see the traces of our community history which we might walk or drive past every day.
“As things lift, when inter-county travel returns, there’ll be a rush into the city,” he says. “I hope one of the effects of this walking tour is that it’s a piece of encouragement to look for some of those things which are hiding in plain sight.”
The Guinness In The Liberties walking tour will be on SPF TV from 4pm on St Patrick’s Day, and available for streaming up until March 21. SPF TV can be viewed online at the St Patrick’s Festival website, or live to 1.1 million homes in Ireland on the Oireachtas TV channel. As always, #drinkresponsibly, and remember to visit here for more information on knowing your alcohol limits.
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