We’ve been asked this question several times, so we decided to do a bit of mathematical sleuthing. Revenue.ie provide a constantly updated list of license holders for pubs, restaurants, off-licenses, and everything up to a license to sell alcohol in an aerodrome.
Using this we filtered out anything that didn’t have a ‘Publicans license (7-day ordinary). We then filtered out every county other than Dublin.
The results we got were that there are (as of the 25th of August 2015) 751 pubs in the entirety of Dublin city and county. That might seem low, but bear in mind that this excludes anybody operating on a hotel bar of restaurant license.
There is 1 pub for every 1,695 people in that area. There are 6,984 pubs in the whole of Ireland. Compare that to Ireland in 1904 when there were approximately 13,000 pubs.
Strangely, this means that Dublin has only 10.75% of the countries pubs, despite having 27.11% of the population.
If you want to check the register or the maths for yourself, you can see it all on the revenue website.
