Dublin’s history is not all literary salons and Georgian elegance. Beneath the surface lies a city shaped by heists, murders, kidnappings, and the kind of criminal enterprises that could fill a shelf of true crime books. This two-hour walking tour peels back the respectable facade and takes you deep into the dark side of the Irish capital, from the Viking era right through to modern organised crime.
Starting at College Green, your guide leads you through streets where some of Ireland’s most notorious crimes played out. You will hear about the audacious 2009 Bank of Ireland heist, the tiger kidnappings that terrorised suburban Dublin, and the still-unsolved theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from Dublin Castle in 1907. At Trinity College, the tour reveals a series of murders that most visitors have no idea ever occurred within those august walls. The story of Darkey Kelly - accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Dublin - is one of the city’s grimmest tales, and your guide tells it with the mix of historical context and dark humour that the subject demands.
The route winds through the medieval core of the city, past the former red-light district where Molly Malone plied a rather different trade than the one celebrated in the famous ballad. You will learn about the graverobbers who supplied Dublin’s medical schools, the debtor’s prisons where the unlucky ended up, and the courageous journalist Veronica Guerin whose investigations into the Dublin drugs trade cost her life. The tour finishes at St Audoen’s Park, and you will leave seeing the city in an entirely different light.
