5 Best Things to Do in Dublin During Halloween

Marsh's Library on St Patrick's Close was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1707, which makes it the oldest public library in Ireland and, for roughly 150 years, the only public library in Dublin. Archbishop Narcissus Marsh founded it and Sir William Robinson designed the building. Very little has moved since. Readers still sit at the original table, and the wired alcoves at the back, built to lock scholars in with the rarest books, are still there. The library's own account of its readers is short and useful: Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker and James Joyce all read here. Entry is 8 euro for adults, 6 euro for students and over-65s, and free under 18.

The Stoker connection is why the library keeps appearing on Bram Stoker Festival venue lists, and why its calendar needs checking before anything else in this guide. Marsh's Library opens Tuesday to Friday from 09:30 to 17:00 and Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00. It closes on Sundays, Mondays and bank holidays. Across the festival window of Friday 23 to Monday 26 October 2026 that leaves exactly two days, Friday 23 and Saturday 24. Sunday 25 and the bank holiday Monday are out, whatever the programme is doing outside.

Outside is not a figure of speech. St Patrick's Park, directly across the close, has served as the festival's family hub, so the quietest eighteenth-century room in the city can have a funfair forty metres from its windows. The reading room stays silent regardless, and the 2026 exhibition, Gulliver 300, runs on through the autumn.

Pro Tip: Be at the door for 09:30 on Friday 23 October. You get the gallery and the reading cages to yourself for roughly forty minutes before the first groups reach St Patrick's Close, and the same 8 euro ticket covers the small walled garden behind the building.

Glasnevin was consecrated on 21 February 1832 as a burial ground where Catholics could be buried with a service, after a campaign led by Daniel O'Connell. More than 1.5 million people lie here, including an estimated 800,000 in unmarked ground from the Famine and the cholera epidemics. Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markievicz, Brendan Behan and Luke Kelly are all here. The O'Connell Tower above the entrance is the tallest round tower in Ireland at 55 metres, designed by Patrick Byrne and completed in 1855. A ten-pound gelignite bomb wrecked its staircase in 1971 and it stayed shut until April 2018. There are 198 steps to the top.

Glasnevin is worth a Halloween morning precisely because it does none of the things Halloween expects. No costumed guides, no jump scares, no coloured lighting. It is a working cemetery with funerals running while you tour, and the guides talk about typhus, infant mortality and body snatching in a flat register that lands harder than most city-centre ghost walks. The Irish history tour is 14.50 euro for adults and 12 euro concession; the O'Connell Tower climb is a separate 9 euro and 7 euro.

Late October is the practical constraint. The gates open at 09:00 and close at 17:00, the visitor centre runs 10:00 to 17:00, and the clocks go back on Sunday 25 October 2026, which drops Dublin sunset to just after 17:00. On the bank holiday Monday, Dublin Bus and the Luas typically drop to Sunday timetables, so the 40 and 140 from O'Connell Street thin out noticeably.

Pro Tip: Take the 140 from O'Connell Street and be at the gates for 10:00, when the visitor centre opens. Climb the tower first, while the light is still flat over the north city, then join the history tour. Drivers pay 2 euro for the small car park, which holds about thirty vehicles and fills by late morning.

The Hill of Tara stands above the Boyne valley at Dunsany in County Meath, Eircode C15 P44W, and the grounds are open all year for nothing. The Mound of the Hostages, the passage tomb near the summit, is around 5,000 years old. Ráith na Ríg, the oval enclosure that rings the top of the hill, was built about 100 BC. The Lia Fáil, the standing stone at the centre, is the one every schoolchild in Ireland is told roared when the rightful king touched it. From the ridge on a clear day you can pick out low hills across Meath and Westmeath.

The visitor centre is the catch. It runs from 1 May to 30 September only, 10:00 to 17:00, with guided tours during those months at 5 euro for adults, 4 euro for over-65s, 3 euro for students and children and 13 euro for a family. Arrive in late October and all of it is shut: no guide, no audio-visual, no toilets, no interpretation. You walk up through the churchyard gate onto an unlit, unfenced and thoroughly muddy hilltop and work it out yourself.

That is the argument for coming at Halloween rather than in July. Tara is one of the sites the Púca flame is said to link, and standing on an empty ridge in wind and low light gets you nearer to what a Samhain assembly felt like than any staffed exhibition would. Bring boots. The grass is short, the ground underneath it is not, and there is no shelter anywhere on the hill.

Pro Tip: Aim to be on the hill between 12:00 and 14:00, when the low autumn sun sits behind you and the earthworks actually read as earthworks. Without a car, Bus Éireann route 109 between Dublin and Navan stops on the R147 about a ten-minute walk below the site, and that road has no lighting after dusk.

For four nights a year the small Meath town of Athboy carries Ireland's claim to have invented Halloween. The Púca Festival runs from Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November 2026 across Athboy and Trim, and the Lighting of the Samhain Fire takes place on Athboy's Fair Green on Saturday 31 October. It is free, non-ticketed and standing, with the band Kíla playing. The Fair Green is a six-and-a-half acre common between the Trim Road and the Dunderry Road, walled from the 1840s and handed to public trustees by the Earl of Darnley in 1910.

The reason the fire is lit here rather than in Dublin sits two kilometres east. Tlachtga, the Hill of Ward, is a four-ditched earthwork roughly 150 metres across, over a larger 195-metre enclosure that University College Dublin excavations in 2014 and 2015 dated to the late Bronze Age. The seventeenth-century chronicler Geoffrey Keating recorded that every fire in Ireland was put out on Samhain night and relit from this flame. The hill is private farmland and closed to visitors, so do not plan on climbing it.

Getting out is straightforward and getting back is not. Bus Éireann route 111 runs from Dublin to Athboy via Trim, and the festival adds a dedicated coach from Dublin plus a free hourly Trim-Athboy shuttle taking 20 to 30 minutes. Age limits on the paid shows are strict: 16 and over for the Big Top, 18 and over for the Samhain Circus. Bags larger than 40 cm by 40 cm by 20 cm are refused at every gate.

Pro Tip: Set your satnav for Athboy Library on Main Street, C15 TY80, rather than the Fair Green, which has no single Eircode of its own. Be on the green by 18:00 on 31 October: the common itself holds a crowd, but the two roads feeding into it do not. Check the last shuttle back to Trim before you commit to staying there.