Three days of world-class training deserve a city to match. From Georgian squares to snug pubs with live fiddle music, here is how to turn your conference ticket into a proper Dublin weekend.
There are conferences you fly in for, sit through, and fly home from. IHC 2027 is not built to be one of them. When we chose Dublin, again deliberately, it was because the city itself does half the work a good conference weekend needs: it relaxes you, feeds you well, and gives you something to talk about with a colleague you met an hour ago.
The conference runs Friday 16 to Sunday 18 April at the Clayton Hotel Liffey Valley, twenty minutes from the city centre. That puts you close enough to dip into Dublin every evening, and far enough out that you will actually sleep. Here is how seasoned delegates do it.
Thursday evening: arrive early, settle in
Flights into Dublin from the UK take under ninety minutes, and most European hubs are under three hours. Arrive Thursday evening if you can. Drop your bags, then head for the Liffey boardwalk as the light goes down. The Ha’penny Bridge and the Custom House are at their best at dusk.
For a first-night dinner, delegates rate The Winding Stair, a bookshop-turned-restaurant overlooking the river, and Brazen Head, reputedly Ireland’s oldest pub, pouring since 1198, for something less formal. Neither needs a taxi from the city centre; both need a booking.
Between sessions: the city in small doses
The conference programme is full, but evenings are yours. Trinity College and the Book of Kells stay open into the early evening in April, and the Long Room, a 65-metre barrel-vaulted library holding 200,000 of Ireland’s oldest books, has a way of putting a day of CPD into perspective.
If your practice leans towards the contemplative, the National Gallery of Ireland on Merrion Square is free to enter, quiet on weekday evenings, and holds Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, lost for two centuries and found hanging in a Dublin Jesuit house in 1990.
And then there is the music. Dublin’s traditional sessions start around 9pm. The Cobblestone in Smithfield is the musicians’ choice, O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row is where The Dubliners started, and neither charges a cent to listen.
A good conference gives you techniques. A great conference gives you techniques and a story about the night a fiddle player made a room of two hundred strangers go completely quiet.
Sunday night: stay one more day
The closing keynote ends at four on Sunday. You could make an evening flight, or you could stay one more night and give yourself Monday morning in the city with no agenda at all. St Stephen’s Green at 9am, coffee on Drury Street, a slow wander through the Georgian doors of Fitzwilliam Square.
Delegates who stay the extra night tell us the same thing every year: it is the decompression day that makes the learning stick. Book the Monday off. You will not regret it.