Sixteen licences, thirty carriages
There are sixteen licensed horse-drawn carriage drivers in Dublin. On a good afternoon you can count thirty carriages working the city, most of them gathered outside the Guinness Storehouse looking for tourists. That gap is the whole problem, and everything people complain about online comes out of it.
A licence is not a formality. It means the carriage has been inspected, the horse is vet checked and shod, there is insurance behind the ride, and the person on the box seat is accountable to somebody if it goes wrong. When most of the carriages on the street are outside that system, there is nobody to answer to and no standard to fall below.
What visitors run into
The pattern is always the same. A price is agreed, the ride is shorter than promised, and at the end the figure has quietly become per person rather than per carriage. People are set down streets away from where they asked for. It is cash only, and sometimes there is a walk to an ATM. If you look up Dublin carriage rides afterwards you will find page after page of exactly that story.
Those reviews land on all of us. There is one listing on TripAdvisor carrying our family name that collects complaints about rides we never gave, from drivers we have never employed, picked up in parts of the city we do not work. We have no way to take it down and no way to answer for it.
This is our living, not a summer job
My brother Brendan and I have been at this our whole lives, and the family has been driving Dublin since 1994. I have held a city carriage licence for more than twenty years. Our horses are Dutch Friesians and they are the same horses that draw the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s state carriage on St Patrick’s Day. We have supplied Dublin City Council for the opening day of the RDS Dublin Horse Show for over fifteen years, and our carriages and drivers have worked on Vikings, Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful.
“We have been at this our whole life, and we can proudly say we have never had a disappointed customer.”
You do not build that over thirty years by short-changing people on a twenty minute ride. It is the reason we put our prices on this website per carriage and not per person, and the reason you will always be told the full figure before the horse moves.
What needs to happen
I raised this with the Minister for Transport five years ago and the trade is no better regulated for it. What is needed is not complicated: enforce the licences that already exist, inspect the carriages and the horses, and make sure anyone taking money from a visitor on a Dublin street is answerable for it. Every driver working inside the rules would welcome that tomorrow.
Booking with confidence
Until that happens, the only protection a visitor really has is to book ahead rather than take pot luck at the rank. Ring the operator directly. Ask what the price covers and whether it is for the carriage or the head. Ask where you will be set down. Anyone running a proper business will answer all three without hesitating.
Written by David Mulreany of Mulreanys Carriages, a licensed Dublin carriage driver of more than twenty years.
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