Among them was Matt White's tavern, a drinking house that survives in the historical record only as a brief but telling mention in J.E. Walsh's 1973 study of the area, cited on pages 70 and 74. That such a place is noted at all speaks to something worth pausing over: the Liberties had its own dense social fabric, and the neighbourhood tavern was central to it in ways that went well beyond the serving of ale.

The Liberties took their name from the jurisdictional freedoms granted to various landlords and ecclesiastical bodies outside the old walled city of Dublin, meaning residents and businesses here operated under different legal arrangements than those inside the walls. This created a notably independent district, one that attracted craft industries, particularly the wool and silk weaving trades, and generated a busy, sometimes turbulent street life across the early modern period. Matt White's tavern belonged to this world, a named premises in a named quarter, recorded by Walsh as part of his mapping of the Liberties' social and commercial landscape. Beyond that, the documentary record offers little more: no dates of operation, no precise street address, no further detail of the proprietor himself.

Because no specific location for the tavern has been established in the surviving record, there is no single spot a visitor can stand and say with confidence that this was the place. What the area does still offer is a sense of the streetscape that would have surrounded such an establishment. The Liberties today retains fragments of its older character alongside the considerable changes of recent decades, and the streets around the Coombe, Meath Street, and Thomas Street give some flavour of the district Walsh was describing. Anyone interested in tracing this kind of social history would do well to seek out the Walsh volume itself, which remains one of the more granular accounts of daily life in this part of the city.