Start this walk on the south side of the Talbot Memorial Bridge, and look across and a little to your left to the remarkable façade of the Custom House. This grand building with its verdigris copper dome, crowned by an allegorical statue of Commerce, is one of the triumphs of English architect James Gandon. Its history has not been happy. It became redundant only nine years after it was built, when Ireland’s parliament was merged with Britain’s and the customs and revenue offices moved to London. Through the 19th century it became more dilapidated, and in 1921 Sinn Fein firebrands administered the coup de grâce. The hated symbol of British rule burned for five days, and although it was patched up in the mid-1920s the building was not fully restored until 1991. Since then, it has housed various government departments.Cross the bridge and turn right along Custom House Quay, passing the Famine Memorial on the right. The potato has been both a blessing and a curse to Ireland. When it was introduced from America in the 17th century, it provided a cheap, plentiful and nourishing staple – so much so that by the 19th century many Irish families ate almost nothing else. When potato blight destroyed the entire crop, an estimated one million people starved to death. This was the Great Famine of 1845–48. Most of the deaths could have been prevented, but the British government was slow to lift taxes and release stocks of grain (of which there was plenty) to feed the starving. Ireland’s population fell by half over the next few decades, as millions of people emigrated to England, Scotland and America, and the number of people living in Ireland today is still well below the pre-famine level. Many of the people driven from their rural homes by hunger got no further than the Dublin slums, altering the character of the city forever.

Leave the memorial and walk back to pass the Talbot Memorial Bridge and follow the north side of the quay. Take the next right after Custom House, called Beresford Place. Cross the street, pass Old Abbey Street on the left and take the next left into Abbey Street Lower. Ireland’s national theatre is on the left side of the street at No. 26. Ireland’s 20th-century cultural renaissance began with the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, by William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s most famous poet, and his amanuensis, Lady Augusta Gregory. Many of the works first performed here – by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Oscar Wilde, and more recently Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard – have been controversial. Sadly, in 1951 a fire destroyed the original theatre building and it took until 1966 for the theatre to re-open in a new building on the same site. Plans to relocate the Abbey Theatre to the Waterfront District were shelved in 2010 – much to the delight of this historic theatre’s followers.

Turn left from Abbey Street Lower on to Marlborough Street, return to the riverside passing Dublin’s newest bridge, the Rosie Hackett Bridge, opened in 2014. Turn right on Eden Quay and follow this across O’Connell Street, and turn right on Eden Quay. Follow this across O’Connell Street, after which it merges into Bachelors Walk. At the west end of Bachelors Walk, the metal arch of the Ha’penny Bridge carries foot traffic across the Liffey. When it was built, in 1816, it was first named after the Duke of Wellington, then at the height of his fame as the victor of Waterloo. Its nickname comes from the halfpenny toll, which was charged to cross it, and was much resented. Since 1919, however, crossing has been toll-free.

Pass the bridge and carry on along Ormond Quay Lower. On your right is the glitzy and pretentiously named ‘Quartier Bloom’, also known as the ‘Italian Quarter’. Opened in 2005, this pedestrianised mall-style shopping-and-eating development is completely inauthentic (Dublin has never had an Italian quarter until it was invented here) but it does have has some excellent restaurants and cafés and is a welcome addition to the riverside.

Continue along Ormond Quay Lower. Across the street is the Liffey’s Millennium Bridge. The pedestrian bridge was built in kit form in County Carlow, 50 miles (80km) from Dublin, then reassembled on the Liffey. The steel from which it is constructed came from Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard that built the ill-fated Titanic.

Pass the Millennium Bridge and walk along the riverside,crossing Capel Street (with Grattan Bridge on your left), Arran Street East and Chancery Place on your left, to Inns Quay. Ahead of you, overlooking the river, is a majestic building of pale grey stone capped by a green copper lantern dome supported by Corinthian columns. The Four Courts building, completed in 1802, is James Gandon’s finest work. Like Gandon’s Custom House, where we began this walk, it fell victim to the violence of Ireland’s independence struggle. In 1922, at the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, it was occupied by Republican fighters. In a grimly ironic re-enactment of the events of Easter 1916, the Free State army, commanded by Michael Collins, borrowed artillery and gunners from the British and shelled the Four Courts to rubble. As the building burned, the Republican leader Cathal Bruha charged out, still shooting, and was gunned down by Free State soldiers. The Civil War was a tragic, and ultimately pointless conflict between the faction of the independence movement, which accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and the Republican faction, which repudiated it. The treaty created the Irish Free State, composed of the 26 counties that make up modern Ireland, but left the six counties of Ulster, where Protestants loyal to Britain were in the majority, under British rule. Collins, and other members of the Free State government, accepted it as the best deal they were going to get. Eamon de Valera, Brugha and other hardliners wanted nothing less than a fully independent Irish republic comprising all 32 counties. The war was a low-key conflict by modern standards, with casualties on either side in hundreds rather than thousands, but it left long-lasting scars. Collins was killed in an ambush in 1923; in May that year, de Valera ordered a ceasefire and returned to conventional politics. Nine years later, he was elected Taoiseach (prime minister), and remained prominent in Irish politics almost continuously, first as prime minister, later as president, until his death in 1973.