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History Of DublinThe City of Dublin can trace its origin back 2000 years, and for much of this time it has been Ireland's capital and center of culture, education and industry. During this time it has stood witness to famine, peace, social change, war which have effected Ireland. Founding and early history The earliest reference to Dublin appears in the writings of Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), the Greek astronomer and cartographer, around the year A.D. 140, who calls it Eblana Civitas. This would seem to give Dublin a just claim to nearly two thousand years of antiquity, as the settlement must have existed a considerable time before Ptolemy became aware of it. Beginning in the 10th century, there were two settlements where the modern city stands. The Viking settlement was known as An Dubh Linn (or Black Pool, referring to a black pool of water) (It was called Dyflin by the Vikings), which was located in the area now known as Wood Quay, and a Celtic settlement, th Cliath ("hurdle ford") further up river. The Celtic settlement's name is used as the Irish language name of the city, while the modern English name came from the Viking settlement. Dublin became the centre of English power in Ireland after the 12th century Norman conquest of the southern half of Ireland (Munster and Leinster), replacing Tara in Meath -- seat of the Gaelic High Kings of Ireland -- as the focal point of Ireland's polity. Over time, however, many of the Anglo-Norman conquerors were absorbed into the Irish culture, adopting the Irish language and customs, leaving only a small area around Dublin, known as the Pale, under direct English control. People outside this area were still considered savage, giving rise to the expression "Beyond the Pale". Medieval Dublin After the Anglo-Norman taking of Dublin in 1171, many of the citys Norse inhabitants left the old city, which was on the south side of the river Liffey and built their own settlement on the north side, known as Ostmantown or "Oxmantown". Dublin became the capital of the English Lordship of Ireland from 1171 onwards and was peopled extensively with settlers from England and Wales. The rural area around the city, as far north as Drogheda, also saw extensive English settlement. In the 14th century, this area was fortified against the increasingly assertive Native Irish becoming known as the Pale. In Dublin itself, English rule was centred on Dublin Castle. The city was also the seat of the Parliament of Ireland, which was composed of representatives of the English community in Ireland. Important buildings that remain from this time include St Patrick's Cathedral, Christchurch Cathedral and St Auden's Church, all of which are within a kilometre of each other. The last surviving section of Dublin's medieval walls overlook St Auden's onto Cook St. The inhabitants of the Pale developed an identity familiar from other settler-colonists of a beleaguered enclave of civilisation surrounded by barbarous natives. The siege mentality of medieval Dubliners is best illustrated by their annual pilgrimage to Cullens field in Ranelagh, where in 1209, 500 recent settlers from Bristol had been massacred by the OToole clan during a fair. Every year on "Black Monday", the Dublin citizens would march out of the city to the spot where the atrocity had happened and raise a black banner with a raven emblem in the direction of the mountains to challenge the Irish to battle in a gesture of symbolic defiance. This was however, still so dangerous until the 17th century that the participants had to be guarded by the city militia and a stockade against, "the mountain enemy". Medieval Dublin was a tightly knit place of around 5-10,000- people, intimate enough for every newly married citizen to be escorted by the mayor to the city bullring to kiss the enclosure for good luck. It was also very small in area, an enclave hugging the south side of the Liffey of no more than three square kilometres. Outside the city walls were suburbs such as the Liberties, on the lands of the Archbishop of Dublin, and Irishtown, where Gaelic Irish were supposed to live, having been expelled from the city proper by a 15th century law. Although the native Irish were not supposed to live in the city and its environs, many did so and by the 16th century, English accounts complain that Irish Gaelic was starting to rival English as the everyday language of the Pale. Life in Medieval Dublin was very precarious. In 1348, the city was hit by the Black Death a lethal bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century. In Dublin, victims of the disease were buried in mass graves in an area still known as "Blackpitts". The plague recurred regularly in city until its last major outbreak in1649. The city was also the scene of constant warfare, both endemic low level violence and as a battleground in major wars. Throughout the middle ages, it paid protection money or "black rent" to the neighbouring Irish clans to avoid their predatory raids. In 1314, an invading Scottish army burned the citys suburbs. As English interest in maintaining their Irish colony waned, the defence of Dublin from the surrounding Irish was left to the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare, who dominated Irish politics until the 16th century. However, this dynasty often pursued their own agenda. In 1487, during the English Wars of the Roses, the Fitzgeralds occupied the city with the aid of troops from Burgundy and proclaimed the Yorkist Lambert Simnel to be King of England. In 1536, the same dynasty, angry at the imprisonment of Garret Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare besieged Dublin Castle, leading Henry VIII to send a large army to destroy the Fitzgeralds and replace them with English administrators. During the Nine Years War of the 1590s English soldiers were required by decree to be housed by the townsmen of Dublin and they spread disease and forced up the price of food. The wounded lay in stalls in the streets, in the absence of a proper hospital. In 1597, the English gunpowder store in Winetavern Street exploded, killing nearly 200 Dubliners. In the 1640s, the city was besieged twice during the Irish Confederate Wars, in 1646 and 1649. However on both occasions the attackers were driven off before a lengthy siege could develop. Colonial Dublin Dublin and its inhabitants were transformed by the upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries in Ireland. These saw the first thorough English conquest of the whole island under the Tudor monarchs. While the Old English community of Dublin and the Pale were happy with the conquest and disarmament of the native Irish, they were deeply alienated by the Protestant reformation that had taken place in England, being all almost all Roman Catholics. In addition, they were angered by being forced to pay for the English garrisons of the country through an extra-parliamentary tax known as "cess". Several Dubliners were executed for taking part in the Desmond Rebellions in the 1580s. As a result, the English authorities came to see Dubliners as unreliable and encouraged the settlement there of Protestants from England. These "New English" became the basis of the English administration in Ireland until the 19th century. Protestants became a majority in Dublin in the 1640s, when thousands of them fled there to escape the Irish Rebellion of 1641. In 1650s after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Catholics were banned from dwelling within the city limits under the vengeful Cromwellian settlement but this law was not strictly enforced. Ironically, this religious discrimination led to the Old English community abandoning their English roots and coming to see themselves as part of the native Irish community. By the end of the seventeenth century, Dublin was the capital of the Kingdom of Ireland ruled by the Protestant New English minority but also probably larger, more peaceful and prosperous than at any time in its previous history. From a Medieval to a Georgian City By the beginning of the 18th century the English had established control and imposed the harsh Penal Laws on the Catholic majority of Ireland's population. In Dublin however the Protestant ascendency was thriving, and the city expanded rapidly from the 17th century onward. Though Dublin was in terms of street layout a medieval city akin to Paris, in the eighteenth century (as Paris would in the nineteenth century) it underwent a major rebuilding, with the Wide Streets Commission demolishing many of the narrow medieval streets and replacing them with large Georgian streets. Among the famous streets to appear following this redesign were Sackville Street (now called O'Connell Street), Dame Street, Westmoreland Street and D'Olier Street, all built following the demolition of narrow medieval streets and their amalgamation. Five major Georgian squares were also laid out; Rutland Square (now called Parnell Square) and Mountjoy Square on the northside, and Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square and Saint Stephen's Green, all on the south of the River Liffey. (See Georgian Dublin) Though initially the most prosperous residences of peers were located on the northside, in places like Henrietta Street and Rutland Square, the decision of the Earl of Kildare (Ireland's premier peer, later made Duke of Leinster), to build his new townhouse, Kildare House (later renamed Leinster House after he was made Duke of Leinster) on the southside, led to a rush from peers to build new houses on the southside, in or around the three major southern squares. The massive northside houses ending up becoming tenements, into which large numbers of poor people moved in, often in the process exploited by unscrupulous landlords, who packed in entire families into each large Georgian room. Only one area of the old medieval city, called Temple Bar, located between Dame Street and the river Liffey, survived with its narrow medieval street pattern intact. Perhaps what could be called the start of Georgian Dublin, though it predated the actual Georgian era, occurred in one simple yet monumentally important decision taken by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland under Charles II, the Earl of Ormond (later raised to Duke of Ormond) that buildings on Dublin's quayside would face the Quay rather than have their backs to it, as was the norm in many medieval cities and had been the case up to that point in Dublin. That re-orientation fundamentally changed the view of Dublin seen by people, made the river Liffey and its quays an architectural focal point through its being lined with high quality frontages, and helped shape the new post medieval metropolis. Until 1800 the city housed an independent (though still exclusively Anglican) Irish Parliament, and as mentioned it was during this period that much of the great Georgian buildings of Dublin were built. In 1801 under the Irish Act of Union, which merged the Kingdom of Ireland with the Kingdom of Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland this parliament voted itself out of existence and Dublin lost much of its political influence. Though the city's growth continued, it suffered financially from the loss of parliament and more directly from the loss of the income that would come with the arrival of hundreds of peers and MPs and thousands of servants to the capital for sessions of parliament and the social season of the viceregal court in Dublin Castle. Within a short few years, many of the finest mansions, including Leinster House, Powerscourt House and Aldborough House, once owned by peers who spent much of their year in the capital, were for sale. Many of the city's once elegant Georgian neighbourhoods rapidly became slums. Monto Paradoxically, although Dublin declined in terms of wealth and importance declined after the Act of Union, it grew steadily in size throughout the 19th century. By 1900, the population was over 400,000. While the city grew, so did its level of poverty. Though described as "the second city of the (British) Empire" its large number of tenements became infamous, being mentioned by writers such as James Joyce. An area called Monto (in or around Mountgomery Street off Sackville Street) became infamous also as the British Empire's biggest red light district, its financial viability aided by the number of British Army barracks and hence soldiers in the city, notably the Royal Barracks (later Collins Barracks and now one of the locations of Ireland's National Museum). Monto finally closed in the mid 1920s, following a campaign against prostitution by the Roman Catholic Legion of Mary, its financial viability having already been seriously undermined by the withdrawal of soldiers from the city following the Anglo-Irish Treaty (December 1921) and the establishment of the Irish Free State (6 December 1922).
Powerscourt House
Dublin residence of Viscount Powerscourt.
In the 1980s it was sensitively turned
into a shopping centre
Powerscourt Georgian ceiling
interior Georgian door The Lockout In 1913, Dublin experienced one of the largest and most bitter strikes ever seen in Britain or Ireland - known as the Lockout. The strike was prompted by the activities of James Larkin, a militant syndicalist trade unionist, who attempted organise Dublin's low paid workers. Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Worker's Union (ITGWU) and tried to win improvements in wages and conditions by the use of sympathetic strikes. In response, William Martin Murphy who owned the Dublin Tram Company, organised a cartel of employers, who agreed to sack any ITGWU members and to make other employees agree not to join it. Larkin in turn called the Tram workers out on strike, which was followed by the sacking, or "lockout" of any workers in Dublin who would not resign from the union. Within a month, 25,000 workers were either on strike or locked out. Demonstrations during the dispute were marked by vicious rioting with the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which left 3 people dead and hundreds more injured. James Connolly in response founded the Irish Citizen Army to defend strikers from the police. The lockout lasted for six months, after which most workers, many of whose families were starving, resigned from the union and returned to work. The End of British Rule In 1914 Ireland seemed on the brink of home rule, however the outbreak of World War I led to its postponement. In April 1916 a small band of republicans under Padraig Pearse staged what became known as the Easter Rising in Dublin. Though relatively easily suppressed by the British government, and initially faced with the hostility of most Irish people, public opinion swung gradually but decisively behind the rebels, most of whose leaders had been executed by the British military in the aftermath of the Rising. In December 1918 the party now taken over by the rebels, Sinn Fin, won an overwhelming majority of Irish parliamentary seats. Instead of taking their seats in the British House of Commons, they assembled in the Lord Mayor of Dublin's residence and proclaimed themselves Dil ireann (the Assembly of Ireland). Between 1919 and 1921 Ireland experienced the Irish War of Independence. Following a truce, a negotiated peace known as the Anglo-Irish Treaty between Britain and Ireland was signed. It created a self-governing twenty-six county Irish state, known as the Irish Free State. This triggered the outbreak of the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, when the intransigent republicans among the nationalist movement took up arms against those who had accepted a compromise with the British. The new Free State government eventually suppressed this insurrection by late 1923. The remaining six counties had already been formed into a home rule entity called Northern Ireland under the British Government of Ireland Act 1920. Though given the option in the Treaty of joining the Free State Northern Ireland chose not to do so, triggering the creation of a Boundary Commission to set the borders between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. This was intended to allow largely nationalist areas of the Six Counties to rejoin the Free State. However the Free State were allowed a lot less input to the commission than they had been led to believe and the commission concentrated on economic and topographic factors, rather than the political aspirations of the people who would be living near the new border. In 1925 the Boundary Commission report actually proposed ceding some small areas to Northern Ireland as well. This was a disaster for a Free State government trying to contain militant republicans and the reaction from the government in Dublin was the suppression of the report and the winding up of the commission. Independence Dublin had suffered severely in the period 1916-1922. It was the scene of a week's heavy street fighting in 1916 and again on the outbreak of the civil war in 1922. In between, the local IRA units waged an urban guerrilla campaign against police and the British army in the city. Such was the regularity of attacks on British patrols, that the Camden-Aungier streets area was nicknamed the "Dardenelles" (site of the Gallipoli campaign) by British soldiers. The bloodiest single day of these "troubles" in Dublin was Bloody Sunday in 1920, when the IRA assasinated 14 police detectives around the city and the British retaliated by opening fire on a football crowd in Croke Park. Many of Dublin's finest buildings were destroyed at this time; the historic General Post Office (GPO) was a bombed out shell after the 1916 Rising; James Gandon's Custom House was burned by the IRA in the War of Independence, while one of Gandon's surviving masterpieces, the Four Courts had been seized by republicans and bombarded by the pro-treaty army. (Republicans in response senselessly boobytrapped the Irish Public Records Office, destroying one thousand years of archives). The new state set itself up as best it could. Its Governor-General was installed in the former Viceregal Lodge, residence of the British Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, because it was thought to be one of the few places where he was not in danger from republican assassins. Parliament was set up temporarily in the Duke of Leinster's old palace, Leinster House, where it has remained ever since. Over time, the GPO, Custom House and Four Courts were rebuilt. While major schemes were proposed for Dublin, no major remodelling took place initially. Tackling the Tenements In 1932, Eamon de Valera, senior survivor of 1916 and leader of the defeated anti-treaty forces in the Civil War, won power at the ballot box. With greater finances available, major changes began to take place. A scheme of replacing tenements with decent housing for Dublin's poor began. Plans were proposed for the wholesale demolition of many buildings from the Georgian era, often because they were thought 'old-fashioned' and 'near the end of their life', often because they were seen as symbols of past English and British rule. The Viceregal Lodge was proposed for demolition, to make way for a new residence for the new office of President of Ireland, an office created in Bunreacht na hireann, the new Irish constitution which renamed the Irish Free State ire. Merrion Square, with its large Georgian mansions, was proposed for demolition, to be replaced on its three sides by a national museum, national Roman Catholic cathedral and national art gallery. Though plans were made, few were put into effect and those not implemented were put on hold when in September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and the Second World War began. It was not until the 1960s that substantial progress was made in removing Dublin's tenements, with thousands of Dublin's working class population being moved to suburban housing estates around the edge of the city. The success of this project was mixed. Although the tenements were largely removed, such was the urgency of the providing new housing that little planning went into the building of the new public housing. New suburbs like Tallaght, Clondalkin and Ballymun instantly aquired huge populations, of up to 50,000 people in Tallaght's case, without any provision of shops, public transport or employment. As a result, for several decades, these places became by-words for crime, drug abuse and unemployment. In recent years, such problems have eased somewhat, with the advent of Ireland's so called Celtic Tiger economic boom. Tallaght in particular has become far more socially mixed and now has very extensive commercial, transport and leisure facilities. Ballymun, the scene of Ireland's only high rise housing scheme, has been largely demolished and re-built in recent years. Ironically however, given Ireland's new found economic prosperity, there is once again a housing shortage in the city. Increased employment has led to a rapid rise in the city's population. As a result, prices for bought and rented accomodation have risen sharply, leading to many Dubliners leaving the city to buy cheaper accomodation in counties Meath, Louth, Kildare and Wicklow, while still commuting daily to Dublin. This has arguably impacted negatively on the quality of life in the city - leading to severe traffic problems, long commuting times and urban sprawl. Destruction of Georgian Dublin in the 1960s Dublin escaped the mass bombing of the war due to Ireland's neutrality, though some bombs were dropped by the German air-force and hit a working-class district (The bombing was declared accidental, although many suspected that the bombing was deliberate revenge for de Valera's decision to send fire engines to aid the people of Belfast following major bombing in that city.) By 1945, the planned wholesale destruction of Georgian Dublin were abandoned; the Viceregal Lodge (renamed in 1938 ras an Uachtarin) was restored as a presidential palace. (The Irish state was also in effect renamed in 1949, becoming the Republic of Ireland.) However while Georgian Dublin survived 1930s plans and World War II, much of it did not survive property developers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The historic but now impoverished Mountjoy Square suffered heavily, with derelict sites replacing historic mansions. When in the 1950s a row of large Georgian houses in Kildare Place near Leinster House was demolished to make way for a brick wall an extreme republican Fianna Fil minister, Kevin Boland celebrated, saying that they had stood for everything he opposed. He also condemned the leaders of the Irish Georgian Society, established to battle to preserve Georgian buildings and some of whom came from aristocratic backgrounds, as "belted earls". In the 1960s, the world's longest line of Georgian buildings was interrupted when the ESB was allowed to demolish a chunk in the centre and build a modern office block. By the 1980s, road-widening schemes by Dublin Corporation ran through some of the most historic areas of the inner city around Christ Church Cathedral. The nadir of this approach occurred in 1979 when Dublin Corporation destroyed the largest and finest Viking site in the world at Wood Quay, in the face of national opposition, to build its Civic Offices for its civil servants. In the 1980s and 1990s, greater efforts were made to preserve Dublin's historic fabric. Dublin Corporation's road-widening schemes were abandoned. Strict preservation rules were applied, keeping intact the remaining squares, though Saint Stephen's Green of the three southern squares had already lost much of its Georgian architecture. Ironically one of the worst offender had been the Irish state itself, which had built its (by common agreement) hideous Department of Justice on the site of an eighteenth century building in the 1960s. Indeed the 1960s had seen one of the earliest battles to preserve Georgian Dublin, in what became known as the Battle of Hume Street whose corner opened onto St. Stephen's Green. There an ultimately successful attempt by a property developer to demolish a block of Georgian houses hit the national headlines, and became a cause clbre as involving students, celebrities and future politicians battled to stop the destruction. Though the original buildings were lost, the developer ended up building Georgian pastiche buildings on the site. By the 1990s a greater civic pride and a new management team in Dublin Corporation saw changes in how the city was run; among the results was the restoration of City Hall to its eighteenth century interior (removing victorian and edwardian additions and rebuilds), and the replacement of the famed Nelson's Pillar (a monument on O'Connell Street which had dominated the skyline until being blown up by republicans) by a new Spire of Dublin, the world's tallest sculpture, on the site of the old Pillar and which could be seen throughout the city.
The Spire of Dublin
Dublin's newest monument
is the world's largest sculpture. The new awareness was also reflected in the development of Temple Bar, the last surviving part of Dublin that contained its original medieval street plan. As late as the mid 1980s, Temple Bar was seen as a poor, run down segment of the city, stretching in terms of length from the Old Houses of Parliament in College Green to Parliament Street, which faced City Hall, and which in terms of width stretched from Dame Street to the city quays. In the 1970s, Cras Iompair ireann (CI), the state transport company, bought up many of the buildings in this area, with a view to building a large modern central bus station on the site, in the process replacing the medieval streets and buildings (while the street pattern was medieval, most of the buildings were not, dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century) by one large bus station with a shopping centre attached. However delays in providing the financing led CI to rent out the buildings at nominal rents. Most of the buildings were rented by artists, producing a sudden and unexpected appearance of a 'cultural quarter' that earned comparisons with Paris's Left Bank. Though CI remained nominally committed to its planned redevelopment, the vibrancy of the Temple Bar area led to demands for its preservation. By the late 1980s, the bus station plans were abandoned and a master plan put in place to maintain the Temple Bar's position as Dublin's cultural heartland. That process has been a mixed success. While the medieval street plan has survived, rents have rocketed, forcing the artists elsewhere. They have been replaced by restaurants and a proliferation of bars which draw thousands of tourists but which has been criticised for over commercialisation and excessive alcohol consumption. Some of the more historic buildings in the area have been destroyed in this process, notably St. Michael and John's Roman Catholic Church, one of the city's finest and oldest Catholic church, which predated the repeal of the Penal Laws and Catholic Emancipation. Its interior was gutted to be replaced by a tourist-orientated "Viking adventure centre" which ran into financial problems. While the development of Temple Bar was far preferable to its obliteration under a 1980s multi-story bus station, many people have criticised some aspects of its development, arguing that the new Temple Bar tourist area has failed to show sufficient sensitivity to the potential that had existed. Temple Bar was used as a set for some of the exterior scenes in the film Far and Away. Between December 2002 and January 2003, the Dublin Spire was erected on O'Connell Street. A 120 m tall tapered metal pole, it is the tallest structure of Dublin city centre, visible for miles. It was assembled from seven pieces with a the largest crane available in Ireland. It replaces Nelson's Pillar which was blown up in 1966. Carrickmines Castle: the new Wood Quay? If inner city Dublin was being preserved, the suburbs were not as lucky. Poor planning decisions led to the creation of satellite communities, often ill served by transportation, education or infrastructure facilities. Allegations of improper planning procedures led to the establishment of a series of tribunals of inquiry which produced evidence of considerable political corruption, with land rezoned for development by a minority of councillors (largely though not exclusively by the governing Fianna Fil party which long dominated local and national government) on the basis of political donations made to them by property developers and channelled through a former Government Press Secretary now working for developers. In 2003, a major issue arose over the plans by the National Roads Authority to run the M50 orbital motorway (which had almost encircled the city) through the historic medieval Carrickmines Castle site, the location of which though suspected had been found during the building of the road. Environmentalists and An Taisce, (Ireland's equivalent of the National Trust) took a court case which halted the building, though as with Wood Quay, a government minister overruled the decision "in the interests of development." Immigration Dublin was traditionally a city of emmigration, with high unemployment forcing many of its inhabitants to leave Ireland for other countries, notably Britain and the United States. However, the last decade has seen this process reversed dramatically, with the Irish economic boom attracting immigrants from all over the world. The largest single group to arrive in the city has been returned Irish emmigrants, but there has also been very large immigration from other nationalities. Dublin is now home to substantial communities of Chinese, Nigerians, Russians, Romanians and many others - especially from Africa and eastern Europe.
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