At various times during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attempts had been made to found a university in Dublin, but as Ireland entered the 1590s it was still without such an institution. By that time, England's two universities were already around 400 years old and Scotland had three that had been founded before 1500. With the relative peace following the religious upheavals of the earlier part of the sixteenth century, there was a flowering of new universities and colleges across Europe: Jesus College, Oxford was established in 1571, Leiden in 1575, Edinburgh in 1582, Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584 and Graz in 1585.

In Ireland, it was recognised from the 1560s that, if the Reformation was to become embedded, its inhabitants needed to be educated and its clergy to be trained in the Protestant faith. After a number of proposed schemes had come to naught, the mayor and corporation of Dublin were persuaded in 1590 to set aside the land and the largely ruined buildings on the site of the former Augustinian priory of All Hallows, about a kilometre to the east of the city wall. Application was made to the Queen, Elizabeth I, and on 3 March 1592 the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin was granted a charter.