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The best bars for St. Patrick's Day in Dublin — from Georgian pubs in Ranelagh to Liberties neighbourhood locals that know how to mark March 17th.
The short answer
9 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
Dubliners have a specific relationship with St. Patrick's Day that visitors rarely understand until they've spent the holiday in the city. The tourist version — Temple Bar, overcrowded pubs, overpriced pints — is something most Dublin residents avoid entirely, heading instead to neighbourhood locals in Ranelagh, Portobello, and the Liberties where the day unfolds at a more human pace. The best bars for st patricks day dublin are the ones where the city is celebrating itself rather than performing for an audience, and finding them requires knowing where to look beyond the Liffey-side tourist corridor.
Dublin's great pub tradition is built on neighbourhood locals — places where the community gathers daily and which take on an entirely different character when a major occasion arrives. These are the pubs that Dubliners themselves choose on St. Patrick's Day, away from the parade route crush and the tourist infrastructure of Temple Bar.
How we picked
St. Patrick's Day in Dublin is best experienced in two acts: the parade in the city centre in the morning, which is genuinely worth seeing once, followed by a retreat to a neighbourhood pub for the afternoon and evening. Avoid Temple Bar entirely after noon — it becomes unnavigable and the quality of what you're drinking declines in direct proportion to the crowd density. Our single top recommendation for the full day is Mulligan's on Poolbeg Street for the afternoon — you'll be drinking the best Guinness in the city in the pub where James Joyce drank it a century before you, and that is a context that no other bar in any other city on this day can match. For a more modern evening, the Vintage Cocktail Club's St. Patrick's Day programme is worth booking months in advance.
Sofia has spent years covering European bar culture, with a particular focus on Ireland's pub tradition and the country's whiskey renaissance. She considers Mulligan's the single most important pub in the world for understanding what a bar can be when it does nothing unnecessary.
Last reviewed 2026-05-15 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.