Tara Street

Tara Street was built between 1879 and 1884, to link Great Brunswick Street (Pearse Street) to Butt Bridge, which was opened in 1879.

The new street was built under the auspices of the Corporation’s Public Health Committee, which reported on its completion in April 1884.¹ The Committee put forward four names for the City Council to choose from:

• Eblana – a settlement that appears on Ptolemy’s map of Ireland, believed to be Dublin.²
• Tara -the hill associated with the High Kings of Ireland.³
• Lucas – Charles Lucas, a champion of the rights of the citiizens of the City, whose statue stands in City Hall.⁴
• Davis – Thomas Davis, the Young Ireland nationalist, whose statue also stands in City Hall.⁵

There doesn’t seem to have been a whole lot of discussion about the name; Councillor Clancy proposed that Tara be the name, and this was seconded by Sir John Barrington. Alderman Moyes had them rolling in the aisles with a quip about calling it ‘Jack-Tara’ Street, but Sir John wasn’t amused.

The motion was put and carried, and so we have Tara Street.⁶

1. Minutes 1884/157. ↩︎
2. But see this article, which suggests Loughshinny as the location: R. Darcy and William Flynn, ‘Ptolemy’s Map of Ireland: A Modern Decoding’, in Irish Geography, 41, no. 1 (2008), pp. 49–69.
   https://doi.org/10.1080/00750770801909375. ↩︎
3. Heritage Ireland, ‘Hill of Tara’ (https://heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/hill-of-tara)(accessed 18 March 2025). ↩︎
4. James Kelly, ‘Lucas, Charles’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.004903.v1)(accessed 18 March 2025). ↩︎
5. John Molony ‘Davis, Thomas Osborne’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002433.v1) (accessed 18 March 2025). ↩︎
6. ‘The new street to the Swivel Bridge’, Dublin Daily Express, 8 April 1884. ↩︎