Ireland: Live Music in Dublin

Last year my favorite artist Fletcher had sold tickets for her European tour. Compared to the last time her tickets went on sale, they sold like hot cakes. I found myself in the queue for dates of shows that were closer to me without any luck. However, the last set of tickets available were for Dublin, Ireland. I still had the country on my travel bucket list and figured why not? I could plan a trip around the concert date and go exploring.

Unfortunately Fletcher had gotten very sick in 2023 and had to postpone her tour but it wasn’t far off so here I was faced with a May concert date rather than a November one and honestly it couldn’t have been any better. The weather in Ireland for May was gorgeous, wild flowers were blooming and the sun was shining. So I’m glad Cari had time to heal and I had time to wait for the country to warm up in anticipation on my next adventure.

In planning this trip, I started off using my usual location method which involved finding an affordable hotel in the city location where I could be in walking distance of most of my intended destinations. This led me to Point A Hotel, Parnell Street which was location north of the river. The neighborhood had an interesting vibe and some pockets of sketchy areas but I felt rather safe and only encountered a couple wild drunks which were probably tourists anyway. I flew Aer Lingus for the first time for this trip and was pretty impressed. Their check-in process was easy and when I arrived in Dublin my checked bag was already off the plane and rotating around the belt. I grabbed a taxi from the airport’s official taxi lane as there did not seem to be a good Uber pick-up spot and got a ride to my hotel for about 25-30 euro, which was a pretty fare price since the hotel was about a 25 minute drive. Fare…fair…haha see what I did there.

My hotel allowed me to check-in a couple hours early so I dropped off my bags and headed out to walk around Dublin and find some popular city attractions. My first stop was at The Temple Bar because what else is a tourist to do? I expected the place to be packed and it was relatively busy but I arrived at around 2pm on a Wednesday so there was plenty of room for me to grab a pint from the bar and plant myself right in front of the live music. I opted for a Smithwick’s Red Ale as I’m not the biggest fan of Guinness. You pay for the location here and a pint was a hefty 9 euro so I stayed for about an hour enjoying the live music before heading to a different location to grab some food. I walked a couple of blocks to The Old Storehouse where I ordered the cottage pie which was absolutely incredible. The Old Storehouse also had live music but it wasn’t as upbeat and lively as the music at The Temple Bar. After “refueling” I walked towards Trinity College and headed to the the Book of Kells tour. I’ll be honest in saying I didn’t do much research on the Book of Kells other than seeing photos and knowing it looked rather cool. When I headed into the large hall I was a bit surprised to see about 3 shelves worth of books and the rest of the hall was empty. Spoiler, they’re cleaning all of the books right now so most of them were not on display. The Book of Kells story was told in another hall with a pretty cool virtual projector but the tour itself was close to 25 euro and if I had to go back again and say “skip or stop” I’d probably skip.

Day 2 in Dublin was concert day so I hadn’t made huge plans other than to stop at the Guinness Storehouse for a tour that morning. Before the tour, I stopped at Murphy’s for breakfast and ordered a mocha with the avocado toast. Hands down this was the best breakfast I had the entire trip. The avocado toast was topped with poached egg, pomegranate seeds, cheese and other things, and the best seasoned potatoes I’ve probably ever had.

I walked about 25 minutes to get to the Guinness Storehouse and I arrived earlier than my 1030 start time and they let me enter early anyway. The tour had already been sold out for the day online and I watched the staff have to turn away so many excited folks so if you’re going to go absolutely book ahead of time. I booked the Stoutie tour which gives you access to the self-guided tour, a pint of Guinness with your selfie on it and another pint at the rooftop bar. The tour itself is probably the coolest brewery tour I’ve seen and this is coming from a Wisconsin gal who has toured more breweries than I can remember. The experience was immersive and whether you like the taste of Guinness or not, you’ll enjoy the tour. I highly recommend choosing the earliest tour time because as I went to leave the place was packed.

After finishing up at the Guinness Storehouse, I grabbed a quick bite to eat near the Olympia theatre and then headed to queue for the Fletcher show. You might be asking yourself why I showed up several hours early but this was closing night for the entire European tour and Fletcher has incredibly dedicated fans who followed her across the continent. Many of them had starting queueing around 930am that morning. Now, if you recall reading my Amsterdam blog I mentioned going to see Fletcher at her show in Cologne years ago. At that tour I had an extra ticket with no one to give it to, so I went to twitter to find a dedicated fan and ended up giving them that ticket for free. Now good karma has a way of coming back to you, so when I went to purchase tickets for this Dublin show, I’d gotten general admission but had really been hoping for a meet and greet ticket but they sold out almost instantly. Well, the fellow fan I’d given the free ticket to years ago had happened to snag more than one M&G for Dublin and offered one to me. These tickets could not be transferred so you had to meet the person at the venue and you might be thinking, girl you’re nuts to trust a stranger and plan a whole trip going to another country without a copy of the the meet and greet ticket. Well, I’m not all that crazy but I trusted the karma of this situation and met my new friend Joanna at the show who not only got me in for this meet and greet but also graciously allowed me to go ahead of her to meet Fletcher.

The early entrance allowed us to get barricade at the show and the experience was incredible. Concert etiquette in Europe is top tier, where no one is pushing, shoving or cussing at you. Instead, we checked on each other, passed out water and made sure everyone was having the time of their lives. My new friend Steph who I met at barricade taught me the “Crying in the Car Wash” dance to the opening act Arxx’s song since she’d learned it while traveling the tour with them. The concert was truly incredible and it was heartwarming to see Fletcher’s family and friends in the balcony taking videos of the fans interacting with her. I ended the night by grabbing some merch, huge kudos to the team for not running out on things even though it was the last night of tour and making the buying experience quick and easy. As much as I would have loved to go out and celebrate closing night with some other fans I had to head back to the hotel and get ready for my next adventure to the Cliffs of Moher.