Overview
The Dublin Writers Museum closed in March 2020 and never reopened. A 2020 Bord Fáilte review found it out of date, and in 2022 the closure was made permanent. Its collection has moved across the city to the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) on St Stephen’s Green, so if you’ve come to Dublin for Joyce and Beckett rather than the building, go straight there instead: the practical details are at the end of this page.
What stays behind at 18 Parnell Square is the house. It is really two eighteenth-century buildings knocked together, the grander of them once home to George Jameson of the whiskey family, and inside the rooms are still framed by plasterwork from the Dublin stuccodore Michael Stapleton. There is now a proposal to turn it into a museum for the stained-glass artist Harry Clarke, though nothing has been confirmed.
A House of Words
The idea took shape in the 1970s, championed by the journalist and author Maurice Gorham, and the museum opened on 18 November 1991. For nearly thirty years it walked visitors chronologically through Irish letters, with a personal audio guide offered in six languages. The ground and first floors held rooms for different literary periods; upstairs was the Gorham Library. An annex ran a coffee shop, bookshop and lecture room that hosted author talks and readings, which kept the place closer to a working literary venue than a static archive.
The Collection & Legacy
The museum’s strength was its curated selection of personal and historical items. On show were early editions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, first-edition copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and playbills from Oscar Wilde’s era. The modernist room drew the crowds: James Joyce’s typewriter, a signed first edition of Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s telephone. Contemporary writers were represented too, with works and memorabilia from Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín.
Rather than break up the archive, the whole collection went to the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) at 86 St Stephen’s Green, in UCD’s old Newman House, where Joyce, Maeve Binchy and Kate O’Brien all studied. There the same manuscripts and objects sit alongside digital installations and interactive exhibits, and the museum takes its name from Molly Bloom in Ulysses.
Around Parnell Square
Even with the museum shut, the square is worth a detour if you’re in the north inner city. The Hugh Lane gallery is next door and open, the Garden of Remembrance sits in the middle of the square, and the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national stage, is about a ten-minute walk south towards the river. Just don’t make a special trip expecting to get into number 18: the door stays closed.
Seeing the collection at MoLI
This is where the writers now are, and it’s the better museum anyway. MoLI is open daily, 10am to 5pm, with last admission at 4pm; general admission is €16.50 and a guided tour €18. If you can time it, the First Friday of each month brings free admission on a late opening from 6pm to 9pm. It’s a two-minute walk from the St Stephen’s Green Luas stop, on a string of bus routes, and there are two DublinBikes stations across the road. Check the MoLI website before you travel, as it closes on 17 March, over Christmas and on New Year’s Day.