Why this exists
Ireland's pub culture is, by any measure, exceptional — and exceptionally well-documented in anecdote and in fiction, and exceptionally poorly documented in fact. No single resource listed every licensed pub in Ireland, with an address and a map, in a form that was actually useful. TripAdvisor has some pubs. Google Maps has some pubs. Tourism websites have lists of pubs they think are notable. Nobody had all of them.
The data existed. The Revenue Commissioners publish a full register of publican licences — every pub that holds a current 7-day ordinary licence. OpenStreetMap's volunteer community has mapped roughly 4,100 pub locations across the Republic. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage has detailed records on 689 pub buildings. Wikidata has entries for 71 famous Irish pubs. We joined it all together.
The result is a directory of 6,842 licensed pubs, with maps, opening hours, heritage records, and — for the ones notable enough — Wikipedia articles. It is the most complete publicly accessible record of Irish pubs that exists.
The data sources
Revenue Commissioners: The spine of the directory. Every pub in Ireland that holds a current publican's licence appears in the Revenue Commissioners' open-data register. We use this as the primary source of truth for pub names and addresses. The data is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence.
OpenStreetMap: The world's most comprehensive open geographic dataset. Ireland's OSM community has mapped approximately 4,100 pub locations in the Republic, most with lat/lon coordinates and many with opening hours, phone numbers, and website links. We match OSM records to Revenue records using fuzzy name matching by county. OSM data is published under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which requires attribution and share-alike for derivative datasets. All pages that use OSM data carry the required attribution.
National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH): Published by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the NIAH contains detailed architectural appraisals of 689 active pub buildings and 21 former pub buildings across Ireland. These are structures rated for architectural and historical significance at local, regional, or national level. We use NIAH data on pub pages where available, with attribution. Published CC-BY 4.0.
Wikidata: The Wikimedia Foundation's open knowledge base contains entries for 71 famous Irish pubs with Wikipedia articles. We use this to identify the "legendary" tier in our directory — pubs notable enough to have their own Wikipedia entries. Wikidata is published under CC0.
The two pillars
The Closure Documentation Project is an editorial archive of Ireland's pub closures. Ireland has lost 2,119 licensed pubs since 2005 — roughly 112 per year, accelerating. The Closure Documentation Project aims to build a permanent record of what is being lost: the buildings, the communities, the stories. We draw on NIAH records, DIGI annual data, and submissions from the public. The project is editorial, not comprehensive — we do not claim to document every closure, but to document closures well.
The Live Trad Sessions feed is an aggregator of traditional Irish music sessions in pubs. No existing resource does this at national scale. The Session (thesession.org) catalogues sessions with excellent granularity; our goal is to integrate session data with the pub's full directory record — address, map, opening hours, heritage context — so that finding a trad session also tells you everything else you need to know about the pub. We start with a manually verified seed list and expand as pub owners claim their listings and add session schedules.
Who built this
Pubhub.ie is a project of a small Irish portfolio of specialist websites. Sister sites include themarketingpod.ie and ravendesign.ie. We are not a media company, not a tourism body, and not a trade association. We are a small operation that believes in building useful things from open data.
We do not accept payment for editorial coverage. The directory is what it is because the licence register is what it is. We don't promote pubs that pay us; we list pubs because they hold a licence.
Accuracy and corrections
The data is as accurate as its sources. Revenue licence data is updated annually; OSM data is updated by volunteers continuously; NIAH data is updated periodically by the Department. If you find an error — a closed pub still listed as active, wrong address, missing pub — contact us or claim the listing and correct it directly.