The licencing year for pubs (and all liquor licences) runs from October to September, not January to December, for reasons I do not know and have never looked up. But considering the financial year used to start in April, and annual leave years still legally do; it may just be some legacy oddity we are left with
Anyway, this means that the October published register - which is to end of September - is the one to use to get the closest to reality list of liquor licences. If you pull the November list, you will be missing hundreds of premises - and I have seen some bonkers claimed numbers of pubs in Dublin or Ireland that are clearly based on early year lists. And most years, I remember to publish a year-on-year comparison of pure numbers, and also use this to prune closed premises from both my personal list, and my public maps.
It should be noted that some premises may be trading and not listed due to admin errors, or long-running deferrals of renewals; but they will rarely (I can name exceptions of close to a decade...) be missing for more than a year.
2025's October Revenue list had 978 premises in County Dublin, and 2026's has 981. I have often forgotten to put this number in the year-on-year post, but checking old posts shows 953 in 2022 and 969 in 2023; so the trend of a slight increase in total licenced premises continues. However, it must be noted that most new openings in this time period are hotels; so really the number of conventional pubs continues to creep downwards
Premises which did not renew in the 2024/5 licencing year, and which are not trading, and as such will be removed from my personal list and marked as red on the map, are:
1001203 - Fern & Co, Stepaside - closed for some years
1003994 - TGI Fridays, Fleet Street - closed and due to be changed to a Popeyes Chicken, without a bar. I had visited this premises.
1014208 - The Baths, Clontarf - closed for some years
DG0490 - Caffe Italiano, Skerries - closed and being converted to housing
N0002 - Madigans, Connolly Station - closed, allegedly becoming a Taco Bell. I had visited this premises
N0138 - The Brook, Clontarf - closed and being converted to housing
N2081 - Ripley Court Hotel, Talbot Street - bar being converted to more rooms
N2123 - The Living Room, Cathal Brugha Street - being converted in to the bar of the Holiday Inn Express which already has its own licence. I had visited both of these premises.
S3276 - Red Cow Hotel, Clondalkin - hotel not open to the public in recent years.
S3504 - Tramco, Rathmines - not traded for years, comes and goes off the register as plans progress to rebuild and reopen as a hotel
S4253 - Flying Duck, Dundrum - closed. I have visited this premises.
Additionally, a cross-check against my own list for licences I had left standing there has found one other to be trimmed:
S4187 Ukiyo, Exchequer Street - had left this here despite non-renewal as I assumed Madame Pho would use the licence. Madame Pho does not appear to sell alcohol, and certainly cannot claim to be a theatre as Ukiyo was licenced (due to its karaoke pods). I have visited this premises.
This leaves me at 944/999 on my register; with 34 marked as some form of impossible - nearly all that the premises is not actually open at all, or trades in a completely atypical manner.
It's October presumably because the legal year runs from October to July. Which isn't to say it's not "some legacy oddity", but that's the wiggy world of The Law for ya.
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