Barracks

The National Monuments Service's description

Wellington Barracks / Griffith Barracks

 

A 19th-century barracks on South Circular Road was recorded in 2025 in the ‘Our Shared Built Military Heritage: The online mapping, inventorying and recording of the Army Barracks of Ireland, 1690-1921' a project that was funded by the North South Research Programme 2022-2024 and co-led by University College Dublin and The Open University' (Forbes and McGrath 2025).  The barracks was described in the inventory of the ‘Army Barracks of Ireland - Our Shared Military Heritage, 1690-1921’ as follows; ‘Wellington Barracks was a conversion of Richmond Bridewell or Penitentiary, which itself had been built in or around 1813. Works began on turning it into a barracks in 1887 and the first units were present from 1892. It was the second-last barracks to be commissioned in the project for encirclement of the city first envisaged and commenced at the time of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century – Marlborough Barracks on the north side of the Liffey was the last. Strategically located on the South Circular Road on the north bank of the Grand Canal, Wellington Barracks was equidistant from Beggars Bush Barracks to the east and Richmond Barracks to the west. It was presumably named after the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish military commander, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington. The barracks remained an active military installation of the British Army until the withdrawal in 1922. It was occupied by the National Army from April 1922 and remained an active military barracks until 1991. Renamed Griffith Barracks in honour of Arthur Griffith who died in August 1922, it is now the site of Griffith College, a third-level educational institute'.

 

Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien based on description taken from inventory of the ‘Army Barracks of Ireland - Our Shared Military Heritage, 1690-1921

 

Date of Compilation: 11 November 2025

References

Forbes, S. and McGrath, C. I. 2025  Army Barracks of Ireland, 1690–1921: Barracks Dataset and Supplementary Files (version 1.0). The Open University. Dataset.