Liberties Travel Guide

Two blocks northwest of the Archbishop Marsh's Library is the area known as The Liberties , which was once outside the legal jurisdiction of the city and settled by French Huguenot refugees escaping religious persecution in their own country. They set up home and poplin- and silk-weaving industries in the southern part of The Liberties known as the Coombe (there is now a street named after it). The ten thousand Huguenots who arrived between 1650 and the early eighteenth century had a great civilizing effect on what was then a small and underdeveloped city: they founded a horticultural society and encouraged the wine trade. The Liberties have maintained the characteristics of self-sufficiency that the Huguenots brought with them, and there are families able to trace their local roots back for many generations. In the nineteenth century, local rivalries frequently erupted into violence between the Liberty Boys, the tailors and weavers of the Coombe, and the Ormond Boys, butchers who lived in Ormond Market (to the north of the Liffey at Ormond Quay). Today, The Liberties are still a hotchpotch of busy streets full of barrows and bargain and betting shops, but Government tax incentives and low property prices have encouraged speculators to build blocks of high-security luxury apartments, which sit oddly among the urban jumble.