Dublin’s Horse History

Patrick Ryan looks at Dublin’s long love affair with all things equine.

What would Dubliners of the past make of our modern capital?

Along with the obvious changes in technology, living standards, and fashions what we lack would perhaps come as big of a surprise to them as all we have.
One of the first questions would surely be: “Where have all the horses gone?”
Cathy Scuffil, Dublin City Council’s Historian in Residence for the Dublin South Central area says that up to the 19th century everything, and everyone depended on the mare, gelding and stallion.

“Horses were hugely important to Dubliners, and basically the only viable means of transport. Even the trams and canal barges were horse-drawn. Look at the success of Guinness; the barges, the draymen…the horse plays a huge part in that story,” she told our website.
Private carriages, hackney cabs, omnibuses, trams, commercial and delivery vehicles of all sorts relied on horsepower, while for the well-heeled, and they helped to impress, and influence meaning that by 1854 there were 545,929 horses in the country.

“Ownership of a horse was regarded as a desirable status symbol, and not unusual in cases of holdings of only a couple of acres that did not justify such a possession,” explained Dr Stuart Nassau Lane in his 2006 doctoral thesis on the history of the Irish horse at Maynooth University.
The demand for Irish mounts went far beyond our shores.

“The favoured animal for ordinary ‘troopers’ was the Irish half-bred hunter type, produced by crossing an old Irish work mare with a thoroughbred sire,” wrote Stuart Nassau Lane.

“This hybrid had an extraordinary ability in crossing country which made it a popular cavalry mount both in Great Britain and on the Continent.”
Of course draught horses were also used to tow artillery pieces, and equipment, which caused friction between the British army and brewers in the Liberties generations before the arrival of Arthur Guinness.

As early as 1689, 70 breweries were located there, and when the army requisitioned these creatures contemporary reports say “… the brewers were disabled from carrying their beer to their several customers to the great disappointment of this city” forcing the the authorities to order that “…anyone who shall seize a brewer’s horse shall be proceeded against as robbers.”

In the aftermath brewer John Pearson of the Liberties’ St Catherine’s Parish was allocated nine horses with others allowed lesser numbers, to satisfy Dubliners’ thirst.

Decades later in 1756 work began on the Grand Canal, linking Liffey and Shannon which itself ran through 11 counties, and in 1785 the opening of the harbour at Echlin Street made deliveries far outside Dublin possible.

However every pound of earth in this massive project had to be dug with a pick, and shovel, before being carried away on a horsedrawn cart, and once completed barges supplying the capital were likewise drawn by roped horses on canal tow paths.

Horses not only served Dublin though, they saved it too.

It might sound like load of BS but in June 1875 a lot of horse poop even stopped the city centre from being burned to the ground!

An explosion, which probably began at Laurence Malone’s bonded spirits storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, close to St Patrick’s Cathedral, spread lava-like whiskey everywhere, the 5,000 hogsheads (c.1.19 million litres) proving impossible to extinguish with water, sand and gravel. In desperation Dublin Fire Brigade Captain James Robert Ingram ordered his men to add horse manure to the mix and the concoction carried the day.

Guinness used horse-drawn carts to take letters all over Dublin but for haulage from St James’s Gate opted for larger breeds like Clydesdales and French Percherons, each with it’s own name.

A guidebook published in 1907 notes that the brewery operated 210 drays and floats, with 171 horses and records show Roy, Cecil and Bruce – as well as pairs like Pride Pride & Prejudice and Rhyme & Reason – worked hard to keep the pubs and hotels well supplied with stout, while their draymen took great pride in their creatures’ care and appearance.

From shiny coats to the gleaming brass and immaculate leatherwork on bridles and harnesses, their efforts were examined by inspectors 12 times a year and as late as 1960 Guinness continued to use horses for some local deliveries, under contract with W & R Richardson. Founded in 1830 at one point the company employed 70 carpenters, blacksmiths and harness-makers and operated a farm, stables, forge and paddocks at Springfield, in what’s now Herberton Road.
Laundry drays, equally immaculately turned out, were another important employer.

In a 2018 piece on libertiesdublin.ie Cathy Scuffil points out that in Dolphin’s Barn alone there were four such commercial operations, and the White Heather, located adjacent to the canal dock was large enough to have it’s own stables and harness room. Their draymen and horses competed against staff from Guinness, and other local breweries and distilleries at the annual Spring and Horse Show in the RDS which in 2025 celebrates it’s 150th anniversary.
The show was launched to improve all breeding standards, though well-bred sporting hunter horses, many sired from successful racehorses, were by far the most numerous nags on display.

Breeders and enthusiasts from all parts of the island also competed in the sport which we know today as show jumping, an Olympic event in which the Irish Army still participates.

“Aside from the attractions of the horses themselves, shows were also bustling marketplaces. All manner of horses were, of course, for sale, from prize-winning stallions to children’s ponies, sometimes changing hands for eye-watering prices to aspirational buyers,” explained Dr Sherra Murphy from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, an expert in horse shows in nineteenth century Ireland in a 2020 article for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.
“Equestrian leisure pursuits also required fashionable but practical bespoke clothing, instruction in riding, and goods for the horse itself. Trade stands at the shows catered for all needs, often focusing on the latest innovations.”

A glance at the Spring and Horse Show’s catalogue from August 1900 reveals some interesting names, including one of the few female exhibitors, Miss A. Gore-Booth of Doonally in Co Sligo who brought her chestnut-coloured, yearling filly to the RDS.

Aideen, a niece of Constance Gore-Booth who was busy preparing for her wedding to the dashing Polish Count Casimir a month later, couldn’t have dreamed that as Countess Marckiviciz her aunt would eventually become the most famous woman in modern Irish history.

By 1860 Dublin’s population had grown to 260,000 and commuters found moving from place-to-place increasingly difficult.

“Unless you were rich and had your own coach, you’d depend on renting a coach to travel around the city, and those weren’t exactly affordable either for the common man,” says Dublin City Public Participation Network’s website dublincityppn.ie in a feature looking back the history of the tram.

Streetcars on rails were the brainchild of an Irishman, “Honest John” Stephenson, entrepreneur and immigrant to New York, where they first appeared in 1831, at around the time early omnibuses – horse-drawn passenger vehicles – began service in Nantes, London, and soon afterwards, Dublin.

Functional, though uncomfortable their lack of rails proved a problem and in 1872 the omnibus was replaced here by the tram, the first running between College Green and Rathgar

Each of these vehicles, looking not unlike a double decker bus, used a team of two horses, but with rest periods, rotation and backups in case of illness 10 creatures were needed per tram and since at it’s peak the network had some 160 of these on the timetables, good mares, geldings and stallions were in high demand.

“The horses were treated better than the men that worked on the trams. They had a veterinary surgeon looking after them, good quality stables, and they were well fed,” dublincityppn.ie concludes.

This continued until 1896 when a new electrified system was launche and the horses didn’t seem too upset at their successors, which rumbled at a steady and largely comfortable 13kph.

“It is worth noticing that the horses the trams encountered along the line seemed to regard them with perfect composure and complacency,” reported the Freeman’s Journal on May 18th that year.

The military was still heavily dependent on horses for decades, however.

Cavalry units waged war from horseback, while artillery and supplies were towed by single creatures, or teams for heavy loads. For example McKee Barracks, originally called Grangegorman Barracks, later named in honour of the Duke of Marlborough (an ancestor of Winston Churchill) and appropriately located on Blackhorse Avenue near the Phoenix Park, though small by cavalry standards would still have been home to almost 1,000 horses, and as many soldiers and officers, in the 1890s. The equine angle proved a powerful recruiting tool in working class Dublin communities, too.

“This tradition of working with horses was also a contributing factor in the number of local men signing up as soldiers in World War I,” says Cathy Scuffil.
“The British Army gave such men the opportunity to continue working with horses at a time when the trades and traditions were entering a decline in Dublin.”

Along with the military the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) also used horses; for crowd control, on traffic duties and for ceremonial occasions. The DMP even ran a successful combined police and fire service from their HQ in Kevin Street for many years with equipment supplied by the corporation.

Sadly the best cared-for horses die eventually, and have to be disposed of, with the kanckers’ yard run by O’Keefe’s of Mill Street and Blackpitts in the Liberties, the final destination of many. Rendering carcasses was an unpleasant task, which certainly left an impression on young Garda Senan Finucane, newly arrived from Co Clare, who patrolled the streets with his friend and comrade Jim “Lugs” Brannigan in the 1930s and 1940s.

“We had O’Keefe’s, the knackers who’d buy animals that would be dead and make bonemeal and crush it for manure,” Finucane recalled many years later.
“They’d skin the animals first and maybe twenty or thirty cattle in a big container boiling and you’d get a smell off that. And you’d see a fella sitting skinning an animal and he’d be taking a mug of tea and a cut of bread while he was actually doing the job. But the people around there maintained that the smell kept down disease.”

The dominance of cars, trucks and lorries relying on horsepower generated from burning petrol rather than calories generated by hay and oats, heralded the inevitable decline of all things equine, though our reputation for producing world class showjumpers and racing stock ensures that the horse continues to play an important role in Irish life even today.

Ironically the Liberties’ link to our four legged companions remained in the UK too, through an unlikely source: a TV sitcom.

In the 1960s and 1970s up to 28 million Britons tuned into every episode of Steptoe and Son on BBC, with Wilfrid Brambell finding fame as Albert Steptoe, a scruffy, scheming rag-and-bone man who with his horse Hercules collects items around London’s Shepherd’s Bush. Brambell was no doubt inspired by many of the Dublin characters he’d met as a freshfaced newspaperman with the Irish Times, driving their horses and carts through his native city, while his father worked as a cashier in Guinness Brewery.

Although jarveys continue to ply their trade in Thomas Street and St Stephen’s Green, and horse-drawn hearses are occasionally used for funeral processions by undertakers, equine ownership in working class communities has become controversial and attracted criticism from animal rights activists. Although horse fairs continue in Smithfield public opinion would suggest their days are numbered, while dangerous incidents during illegal sulkey races leave often-underfed ponies injured and prompt calls for bans.

Could we yet see a resurgence though, with micro breweries or other businesses using properly prepared horses again? We asked Cathy Scuffil.

“It’s difficult to say. I think it would be more a novelty or nostalgia factor, as the facilities are not there. Will the jarveys continue? Everything runs in cycles, so it is hard to predict but the grazing we once had in Dolphin’s Barn is built upon now, so the sort of open spaces you need just don’t exist anymore.”

Today horses are a rare sight on this city’s streets, though since it’s introduction in 1998, initially using the surplus mounts and equipment of the specialists from North Yorkshire Police, nearly 30 years on the Garda Mounted Unit continues to serve as a poignant reminder of a time when the sight, smell and sound of these gentle creatures clip-clopping along were an inseparable part of Dublin life.