History
A millennium or so ago, here where Father Mathew Bridge stands today, a simple, probably wooden, structure served the emerging Viking town of Dyflinn. It led from the fortified, riverside settlement, cluttered with wattle and daub huts to the sparsely inhabited, verdant north side and beyond to the tribal ruled, island interior.
Early river crossing at this point
Washed away by Liffey floods in 1385, the bridge was not completely rebuilt for forty years and as was customary in Medieval times, its care was granted to religious brothers, who exacted a toll from all travellers and in return blessed them with holy water. Through almost four hundred years the bridge stood while the city changed - bursting from it walls, lofty tudor houses sprung up to overhang the river, quay walls framed the riverscape, then came the march of canny merchants and developers across the Liffey, stamping their trademark grand brick houses along the quays, over onto the north side and deeper to the south.
Still in use till 1814, though repaired and restored from time to time, the bridge was, by then, a ‘crazy, wretched pile of antiquity’. The new bridge, the Whitworth Bridge, opened in 1818, just as the new era of industrialisation dawned and a new kind of Nationalism stirred in the hearts of Dubliners. A little over 100 years later, in 1922, it became the Dublin Bridge of the newly independent Ireland and then, in 1938, the Father Mathew Bridge.