Overview
Walk east from O’Connell Street and Parnell Street changes character within a block or two. Past the Ilac Centre and the cinema, the shopfronts turn to Chinese, Korean and other Asian restaurants: the eastern stretch is Dublin’s unofficial Chinatown and Koreatown, and it holds the best cheap food on the north side of the Liffey. If you have an hour on Parnell Street, spend it there rather than in the shopping centre.
The street runs about a kilometre east to west, from Capel Street down to Gardiner Street and Mountjoy Square, forming the south side of Parnell Square a block north of O’Connell Street. It was Great Britain Street until 1 October 1911, when it was renamed for Charles Stewart Parnell. The Parnell Monument at the O’Connell Street junction went up the same year; its sculptor, the Irish-American Augustus Saint-Gaudens, called it ‘the crowning work of my life’.
Where to eat
The first Chinese restaurants here opened decades ago, some of them by people an Irish Dominican nun had encouraged to settle in Dublin; one of the earliest was run by William Wong. That cluster has grown into a proper eating quarter. Kingfisher does seafood; Koh, Kimchi, Lee Charming Noodles and Lao cover Korean, Thai and hand-pulled Chinese, and most take walk-ins. For a drink afterwards, MEMA and The Big Romance are the pick. African and Eastern European shops and cafés fill in around them. Nearly everything is informal and cheap, and lunchtime is the easiest time to get a table.
The western end: shops, cinema and theatres
The western half is the commercial end, and the less distinctive of the two. The Ilac Centre, which opened in 1981, is the oldest shopping centre in Dublin, and it anchors the street alongside the Moore Street Mall next door. Cineworld, on the same stretch, is Ireland’s largest cinema: 17 screens, including IMAX and 4DX. It opened as Virgin Cinemas in November 1995. Chapters, at the Ivy Exchange, is one of the city’s biggest independent bookshops, with new and secondhand stock worth an unhurried browse. For theatre, the Gate is round the corner on Parnell Square, and the Hugh Lane gallery up the square is free, with a room holding Francis Bacon’s relocated studio.
A street that was half demolished
The Georgian city still shows through, above all in the Rotunda Hospital. Bartholomew Mosse founded his maternity hospital in 1745, bought the Parnell Street site in 1748, and opened the purpose-built Rotunda here in 1757; it is still a working maternity hospital. Much of the rest of the street’s older fabric is gone. A 1970s road-widening scheme, the Inner Tangent Road, cleared street after street of Georgian and Victorian buildings, and in 1972 the Noyeks fire on the corner of King’s Inns Street killed eight people. The Ilac Centre rose in 1981 on that cleared ground, over hundreds of demolished buildings and lost laneways such as Little Denmark Street. The eastern end has been rebuilding its character ever since, largely through its restaurants.
Getting there
Parnell Street is a public street, free and open at all hours. The Luas Green Line runs along it, and Connolly and Tara Street stations are both a short walk to the south. For parking, Q-Park Parnell and the Ilac Centre car park (Park Rite) are both on the street. From here it is an easy walk to Henry Street, the Spire and, just south, the Abbey Theatre.