If you're going to be in Dublin for work this summer and you have any flexibility at all about when you come, the answer in 2025 is straightforward: come in mid-August, base yourself in Donnybrook, and let the city's best summer programme in years do the heavy lifting on your evenings. Between the Dublin Horse Show at the RDS, The Big Grill in Herbert Park the following weekend, and a stadium-concert calendar at the Aviva and Croke Park that genuinely punches above the city's weight, there is a four-week window when D4 is, by some distance, the most interesting postcode in Ireland to be staying in.
The Big Grill Festival, Herbert Park
The anchor of the Donnybrook summer is the Big Grill — billed by its organisers as one of Europe's leading live-fire and barbecue festivals, and now running for over a decade in Herbert Park, the Edwardian park that sits between Ballsbridge and Donnybrook village. The 2025 edition is scheduled across four days from Thursday 14 to Sunday 17 August, with day tickets, evening sessions and a full weekend pass on offer. The format is by now well-honed: a main fire pit with international pitmasters from Texas, Argentina, Korea and the UK; a programme of live demos and tastings; a music stage that runs from afternoon Americana into evening DJ sets; and a craft beer and natural wine offering that has become genuinely serious. The food is a long way from a hot dog and a paper plate — you will eat as well as you would at a good restaurant, only outdoors and with brisket smoke in your hair. From any apartment in Donnybrook village it is a five- to ten-minute walk to the gates.
The Dublin Horse Show at the RDS
The week before the Big Grill, the RDS hosts the Dublin Horse Show — Wednesday 6 to Sunday 10 August 2025, three minutes' walk on the other side of Herbert Park. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious showjumping events in the world, with the Aga Khan Trophy traditionally held on the Friday and the Grand Prix on the Sunday, but in practice a huge proportion of attendees come for the wider day out: the showing classes, the dressage, the trade village, the food halls, and the famous social calendar around it. Even if you have no particular interest in horses, it is worth an afternoon for the spectacle alone — the RDS in Horse Show week is one of the few times in the year when the city dresses up. Stretch a corporate trip across both weekends and you can do the Horse Show one Saturday and the Big Grill the next, all from the same apartment.
Aviva Stadium, the Iveagh Gardens and the wider summer programme
Beyond the August double, the rest of the summer rewards anyone who plans ahead. Aviva Stadium — a fifteen-minute walk from Donnybrook through Ballsbridge — has a heavy concert calendar through June, with stadium-scale shows from international touring acts that historically include the likes of Sam Fender, AC/DC, Robbie Williams and the Eagles depending on the year's tours; check the Aviva site closer to the date. Croke Park, around twenty to thirty minutes the other way by bus or taxi, runs its own parallel summer concert programme. In the city centre, the Iveagh Gardens summer concert series in July typically books a strong run of indie and folk headliners across a series of evenings in one of the prettiest small venues in the country, and the Trinity Summer Series brings a similar programme into the cobbled square behind College Green.
For something quieter, Bord Bia Bloom over the June bank holiday weekend (Thursday 29 May to Monday 2 June 2025) takes over a corner of the Phoenix Park with a serious garden and food festival — covered in our Phoenix Park guide — and Taste of Dublin in mid-June fills the Iveagh Gardens with restaurant pop-ups from across the city. Both are easy day-trips from Donnybrook by Luas or a short taxi.
Working a corporate trip around it
Donnybrook's geography for this calendar is as good as it gets in Dublin. Herbert Park is on your doorstep; the RDS is on the far side of it; the Aviva is fifteen minutes through Ballsbridge; Dublin 2 and the IFSC are eight to twelve minutes by the 46A or 145 bus, or twenty minutes on foot via the Grand Canal. That means you can finish a 5pm meeting at a city-centre office, be home in Donnybrook by 5.30, change, and walk to Herbert Park for a 7pm Big Grill session with time for a beer first. The wider commercial pull of the area — RTÉ's Donnybrook campus, a dense cluster of embassies on Ailesbury and Pembroke Roads, and the law and accountancy firms around Ballsbridge — means there is a real depth of business in walking distance, which is why we recommend the area so often for two- to four-week stays. Our Dublin business travel guide covers the wider corporate context, and our short-term apartments vs hotels piece sets out the case in numbers — the gap, on a fortnight or longer, is significant.
For longer relocation-style stays — common in summer when families are on the move between school years — our Dublin relocation guide and our review of our neighbourhoods are the two pieces to read in tandem. If the trip extends to actual work-from-Dublin time around the festival days, our guide to working remotely from Dublin covers the practicalities.
Where to eat in Donnybrook between events
Festival weekends draw a noticeably bigger crowd to D4's restaurants than usual, and Donnybrook's are no exception. The shortlist we tend to send guests, drawn from our definitive guide to eating out in Dublin, leans into the village's strengths: Roly's Bistro on Ballsbridge Terrace for a proper Dublin lunch (the upstairs Café is the easier weekday option), Mulberry Garden tucked behind the village for a serious set-menu dinner on Friday and Saturday evenings, O'Connell's of Donnybrook for an unfussy seasonal menu that locals have been quietly loyal to for years, and Kiely's of Donnybrook for the kind of pre-rugby pint that the area does better than anywhere else in the city. For coffee and a working morning, Coffeeangel in Ballsbridge and the cafés along the lower end of Donnybrook Road cover the early hours.
Practical notes for visitors
Big Grill tickets sell strongly each year and the Saturday evening sessions are usually the first to go — book by the end of June if a particular date matters. The Dublin Horse Show ticket office opens earlier, in the spring; the Aga Khan day and the Grand Prix Sunday are both the early sell-outs. Aviva concerts go on sale through Ticketmaster Ireland, often the previous autumn. For Iveagh Gardens summer concerts and Trinity Summer Series, the lineups are usually announced in March and April with sales through MCD and Singular Artists respectively. Restaurant opening hours and menus shift around festival weekends, so it's always worth a quick check the day before.
If you're flying in for the Big Grill weekend, the Aircoach drops you on Morehampton Road, around five to ten minutes' walk from most of our apartments in Donnybrook village. From the city centre, the 46A and 145 buses run every few minutes along Donnybrook Road. For a longer summer trip combining D4 with a few days exploring the wider city, our guide to Dublin walks only locals know is the single most useful piece on the site, and our Ranelagh corporate stays guide covers the neighbouring village for guests considering D6.
Summer in Dublin is short, but in 2025 it is unusually well-programmed, and Donnybrook is its quiet capital. If you can pin a working trip to the second week of August, do.
Browse our Donnybrook serviced apartments or get in touch for availability around The Big Grill, the Dublin Horse Show and the wider summer programme.