In June 2025 the Grand Lodge of Ireland marked three hundred years since its first recorded communication on 24 June 1725 — a milestone that invites a closer look at how the world’s second-oldest Grand Lodge took shape and how the historic province of North Munster fits within its three-century story.
The Date Being Celebrated
Formed by 1725, the Grand Lodge of Ireland is the second most senior Grand Lodge in the world, surpassed in age only by the premier Grand Lodge of England. In its own historical summary, the Grand Lodge notes that the Masonic fraternity appears to have originated sometime in the sixteenth century and grown in popularity and membership throughout the seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, lodges in England, Ireland and Scotland had formed Grand Lodges to govern the fraternity within their respective areas.
The date honoured in Irish Masonic anniversaries is 24 June 1725, when the first recorded communication of the Grand Lodge took place. That record aligns directly with the earliest surviving newspaper account, printed in the Dublin Weekly Journal of 26 June 1725, describing the installation two days earlier of a new Grand Master, the 1st Earl of Rosse. Because installing a successor implies an existing body, historians recognise that the Grand Lodge was already active beforehand, while treating 1725 as its formal anniversary year. In the mid-west, that milestone sits alongside older survivals of Masonic tradition, including the 1680s “Trinity Tripos” manuscript and Limerick’s brass Baal’s Bridge Square dated 1507.
Three Days in June 2025
To mark three centuries since that first recorded meeting, the Grand Lodge held its 1725–2025 tercentenary programme across three consecutive days in June 2025, bringing together a cathedral service, tours and formal gatherings in Dublin and ending on the anniversary date itself.
The commemorations opened on Sunday 22 June 2025 with a service at St Patrick’s Cathedral. On Monday 23 June, the programme continued with tours, communications and a Grand Master’s reception. The centrepiece followed on Tuesday 24 June — three hundred years to the day after the communication of 24 June 1725 — when the tercentenary celebrations took place at a convention centre in Dublin.
Freemasons’ Hall, Headquarters Since 1869
During the century and a half after 1725, the fraternity expanded across Ireland and abroad. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had developed into a popular fraternity in Ireland, drawing well-known members of Irish society including Daniel O’Connell and many members of the FitzGerald dynasty.
Work on Freemasons’ Hall in Dublin began in the 1860s, and the building opened in 1869. More than a century and a half later, the Hall still serves as the headquarters of Irish Freemasonry, and it houses the museum, library and archive described below.
A Fraternity at Home and Overseas
The institution that marked its tercentenary in 2025 governs the Masonic fraternity across the island of Ireland and in a number of provinces overseas, with Irish Freemasonry numbering approximately 19,000 members around the globe. That international reach reflects the historical spread of Irish warrants across continents.
Today the Grand Lodge lists 14 provincial grand lodges in Ireland: Antrim, Armagh, North Connaught, South Connaught, Down, Londonderry and Donegal, Meath, the Metropolitan Area, the Midland Counties, Munster, North Munster, the South Eastern Counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, and Wicklow and Wexford. Beyond Ireland, it governs 11 provincial grand lodges overseas — in Bermuda, the Far East, India, Zambia, Jamaica and the Bahamas, Natal, New Zealand, South Africa Northern, South East Asia, Southern Cape and Sri Lanka.
Where North Munster Fits
Within that structure of 14 Irish and 11 overseas provinces, the Provincial Grand Lodge of North Munster holds a distinct place in the mid-west. Constituted in 1842 to cover Limerick, Clare and adjoining parts of Tipperary and Kerry, North Munster is separate from the neighbouring Provincial Grand Lodge of Munster. Its creation in 1842 gave provincial form to a regional Masonic tradition that had already been active around Limerick since the early eighteenth century.
Viewed from the Shannon, the three centuries between 1725 and 2025 trace a continuous thread from the earliest days of the Irish Grand Lodge through the Napoleonic-era story of the 1813 Marencourt Cup to the charitable traditions and heritage landscape of North Munster.
Seeing the History for Yourself
Much of the material and documentary record of those three hundred years is open to the public. At Freemasons’ Hall in Dublin, the Grand Lodge Museum, Library and Archive outlines the history of the fraternity in Ireland, provides information on famous personalities in Irish Masonic history, and displays a wide variety of artefacts including regalia and historic documents. The museum is open to the public Monday to Friday — and typically on Saturdays when the building is in use — with no charge for access, while public tours of Freemasons’ Hall run at 3.00pm on most weekdays.
Alongside the museum, the Grand Lodge Library and Archive is used by researchers studying the fraternity in general or tracing family history. Anyone researching an ancestor who may have been an Irish Freemason can consult membership listings from 1733–1923 through a genealogy website, or request a search from the archive — a national counterpart to the regional artefacts and lodge records of North Munster.
This is an independent heritage and educational account and is not affiliated with the Grand Lodge of Ireland or the Provincial Grand Lodge of North Munster.