Until the creation by Lord Iveagh of the park north of St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1901, hundreds of street traders had stalls in the neighbourhood. Iveagh obtained an Act of Parliament to build and gift the markets, subject to the condition that they be run by the Corporation as public markets or the title would revert to his heirs. The site for the markets was cleared by 1900, with the objective of the new indoor market to offer local traders a dry place to sell vegetables, fish, and clothes. It was built by the Iveagh Trust, which was initially a component of the Guinness Trust, founded in 1890 by Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh. The building was designed and built by Frederick G. Hicks. Construction started in 1902 and the market opened in 1906. Maintenance of the market was entrusted to Dublin Corporation. The market building was built in the Edwardian style. The market was split into a dry market facing Francis Street and a wet market in the rear facing John Dillon street. The dry market sold clothes while the wet market sold fish, fruit and vegetables. An adjoining building housed laundry, disinfecting and delousing facilities. This was an innovation in the Dublin market world, and was influenced by Iveagh's sponsorship of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London a decade earlier.
Closure and restoration attempts
By the 1980s, the market had become rundown. In 1993, the council announced plans for a refurbishment. Over the following years, the sum was determined to be inadequate and the council announced in 1996 that it was seeking a private developer to redevelop the market. In 1997, hotelier Martin Keane secured a 500-year lease with a tender. In 2007, Keane was granted planning permission to develop the market and an adjacent site into a food market complex with restaurants, a 97-bed hotel, music venue and apartment hotel. The planning permission was renewed in 2012, and a was expected to begin in spring 2015 and finish in 2017. In January 2018, the city council announced that it would repossess the market site and refund Keane's tender due to his failure to redevelop the site. In September 2019, an architectural condition report commissioned by the city council found that the market was "unsafe" and in an "advanced state of dereliction". The report estimated that essential repairs would cost approximately, which the city council's head of planning said cannot be covered by the city council's budget. docking station in front of the Iveagh Markets building on Francis Street in 2018.
