Dublin: Ha’penny Bridge and Temple Bar

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. Oscar Wilde

One more walk in Dublin before we take a tour outside of the city. Like yesterday, we start from a bridge on the River Liffey then, we move to an entertaining neighbourhood called Temple Bar.

Built in 1816, this bridge was the only one of the River Liffey and half penny was the cost to get to the other side of the river.

More history: “prior to the building of the Liffey Bridge, passenger ferries carried the people of Dublin across the River Liffey every day. When told by city officials that either his ferries would have to have substantial repairs or the city would need a bridge, ferry operator William Walsh elected for the bridge to be built, as long as he was entitled to a toll of a halfpenny (or ha’penny) from anyone crossing it for the next 100 years. True to their word, the city allowed him to extract the toll until 1919 when the turnstiles at either end were removed. By that time, the nickname had stuck.”

Source: https://theculturetrip.com

And now, the rowdiest neighbourhood in Dublin – Temple Bar. Even at noon, the pubs are filled with people and there is lots of cheering coming out of them.

“Temple Bar underwent an ambitious government-sponsored facelift in the 1990s using the designs of several local cutting-edge architectural firms. Today, it’s a hyper-commercialized hive of pubs, clubs, restaurants, and atmospheric alleyways.”(Camille DeAngellis, Ireland, MOON Travel Guide)

Let’s have a quick walk around Temple Bar in Dublin:

The place that gave the neighbourhood its name:

Here is the most romantic and interesting alley we found:

And here is our big discovery. We found this bar very interesting and wanted to see what it looks like inside. A very kind waiter invited us and showed us the bar made with wood salvaged from RMS Mauretania the sister ship of the RMS Lusitania. By the way, Lusitania was sunk in 1915 by a German U-boat 11 mi off the southern coast of Ireland.