Dublin has a long history of women who fought, led, created, and changed things - and most of them don’t appear on the standard tourist trail. This private walking tour spends two and a half hours putting that right.
You’ll hear about Constance Markievicz, who became the first female cabinet minister in Europe. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, one of Ireland’s most determined suffragettes. Maud Gonne, revolutionary activist and the woman who inspired much of W.B. Yeats’s poetry. The tour also covers Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, Ireland’s two female presidents, and the ground each of them broke in how Ireland presented itself to the world.
Your guide has won TripAdvisor’s Traveller’s Choice Award every year from 2020 to 2024. The tour is private, starts with hotel pickup, and covers Dublin Castle, St. Stephen’s Green, Leinster House, Trinity College Dublin, and the Molly Malone statue.
Meeting point: Hotel pickup is included. Your guide meets you beside the Molly Malone statue at the end of the tour.
This tour fills in gaps that most Dublin itineraries leave. The contributions of women to the 1916 Rising, the suffrage movement, and the establishment of the Irish state are well documented in academic circles but chronically underrepresented in popular history. If you’ve done the standard Dublin tour circuit and want to go deeper, this is a genuinely different angle.
Constance Markievicz’s story is worth knowing before you arrive. She was a Sligo-born Anglo-Irish aristocrat who became a nationalist revolutionary, was sentenced to death for her role in the 1916 Rising (commuted on grounds of gender), and later became the first woman elected to the British House of Commons - though she refused her seat and took her place instead in the first Dáil. Your guide covers all of this, but the more context you bring, the richer the tour becomes.
The stop at Leinster House is one of the less comfortable parts of the story. The post-independence Irish state systematically rolled back the rights women had fought for under British rule, restricting their access to the civil service, public life, and the courts. This chapter of Irish history gets less attention than the independence struggle itself, and your guide doesn’t skip it.
Trinity College is worth exploring after the tour ends. The Book of Kells and the Long Room are inside the Old Library and need advance booking in summer - they sell out. But even without going in, the Front Square and the Graduates’ Memorial Building are worth a slow walk through.
St. Stephen’s Green is at its best on a dry day. The park itself - the duck pond, the formal gardens, the Fusiliers’ Arch - is lovely when the weather cooperates. If it’s raining, the tour still works well, but the Green stop is much nicer when you can stand and look around comfortably.