'Dublin is also in great need of a library which shall be at once accessible to the public and contain a good supply of modern and foreign books': Dublin's nineteenth-century 'public' libraries

Abstract This article addresses the 'public' library facilities available in Dublin, Ireland's principal city, in 1850, how these facilities improved in subsequent decades (if at all) and attempts to identify the reasons why Dublin had to wait until 1884 for its first tax-supported, 'free' public library. A version of this paper was first presented at the Fourth Anglo-German Library History Conference, held at the British Library, September 2005. The theme of the conference was 'Libraries and Innovation'.