Foundation and early growth

From prehistoric times people have dwelled in the area around Dublin Bay, and four of Ireland’s five great roads converged near the spot called Baile Átha Cliath, the name stamped by Dublin’s postmark. Dublin appeared in Ptolemy’s Geōgraphikē hyphēgēsis (Guide to Geography; c. AD 140), and some 150 years later “the people of Dublin,” it was recorded, defeated an army from the province of Leinster. Yet, despite indications of habitation 2,000 years ago, the first settlement for which there is historical proof was not Celtic but Norse. That it was Norsemen who established the city suggests that there was remarkably little intercourse between Ireland and the rest of Europe during the so-called Dark Ages and later.

The Vikings, or Norsemen, invaded in the 9th century (c. 831) and built on the river’s south bank and on the ridge above, where Dublin Castle rose 400 years later. They established one of Europe’s largest slave markets and fended off most Irish counterattacks until 1014, when they were defeated at the Battle of Clontarf on the north shore of the bay. They nevertheless reoccupied the town, and Norse Dublin survived and grew, although eventually the Norse kings were reduced to being earls under Irish overlords. Norse Dublin was a prosperous settlement; excavations begun in the 1960s revealed a wealth of archaeological evidence from that period. In the late 1970s the decision by Dublin Corporation to build civic offices on the early Norse riverbank site at Wood Quay provoked bitter opposition.

In 1167 the Norsemen supported Roderic O’Connor of Connaught (Connacht), claimant to the high kingship of Ireland, in driving into exile their overlord, Dermot MacMurrough, the king of Leinster. Dermot returned in 1170 with an army of Anglo-Normans from Wales and retook Dublin. Alarmed lest his Anglo-Norman vassals should claim Ireland for their own, King Henry II of England hurried over with an army to affirm his sovereignty. This was the key to Dublin’s development, establishing it as the centre of government.

Until the middle of the 17th century, Dublin was a small walled medieval town, dominating only the Pale—the thin strip of English settlement along Ireland’s eastern seaboard. In the 500 years to 1660, three uprisings in the city were suppressed, a Scottish siege was forestalled, and the ravages of the Black Death were endured.

At the time of the Reformation, Dublin had become Protestant. During the English Civil Wars, the city’s royalist defenders, after contemplating joining forces with an armed Irish Catholic confederacy, surrendered the city in 1649 to Oliver Cromwell’s English parliamentary army. By the end of the Cromwell era, Dublin was a town of only 9,000 inhabitants. The turreted city wall with its eight gates was a shambles; the two cathedrals tottered; and the dilapidated castle was, as Cromwell himself put it, “the worst in Christendom.” Yet, in the 18th century Dublin was to become the second city of the British Empire.

Ascendancy in the 18th century

The city’s remarkable resurgence began at the end of the 17th century, when thousands of refugee Huguenot weavers from France settled in Dublin after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, curtailed their rights. Flemish weavers came in their wake, and soon the cloth trades were flourishing. It was not long before Dublin’s competition with English cloth interests prompted the British Parliament to impose export restrictions.

In the course of the 18th century, economic prosperity led to the development of Georgian Dublin. Growth extended beyond the old medieval walls; more bridges were erected over the Liffey; and splendid new suburbs arose to the north and east. The city that emerged was, in essence, the Dublin of today.

Culturally, the century was one of the richest periods in the city’s history. Jonathan Swift was dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral between 1713 and 1745, and other noted literary figures—Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Richard Steele, and William Congreve—were active in Dublin. In the New Musick Hall, George Frideric Handel conducted the first public performance of his Messiah in 1742. For the Ascendancy, as the English Protestant establishment was called, Dublin was a colourful, fashionable city of elegance and wit.

It was something less than that, however, for Roman Catholics, who constituted the majority of the population. In 1695 the Irish Parliament, dominated by the Ascendancy, passed the first of the Penal Laws—a series of harsh discriminatory measures against Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland. These laws disenfranchised Catholics, placed restrictions on their ownership of property, hindered them from entering the professions, and obstructed their education. As a result, the majority of the population was impoverished and degraded.

Evolution of the modern city

In 1801 the Act of Union between England and Ireland abolished the Irish Parliament and drastically reduced Dublin’s status. With no governmental duties to compel their presence in Dublin, the leading figures of the Ascendancy returned to England. The city fell into a decline from which it did not recover until 150 years later. Dispossessed peasants crowded into the Georgian houses that owners rented piecemeal, which reduced these once elegant structures to slums. Anyone who owed more than 10 shillings could be imprisoned, and, until the legislation was revised in 1864, Dublin’s jails overflowed with debtors.

Overcrowding and even greater poverty were results of the collapse of smallholdings during the Irish Potato Famine (1845–49), when tens of thousands flocked into the city from the countryside. The 1997 Famine Memorial at Customs House Quay, designed and cast by the Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie, commemorates the period. Emigration, a major element in Irish life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, mounted after 1845, with England and the United States being the principal destinations of those leaving Dublin.

With the eventual easing of the Penal Laws in the second half of the 18th century, a Roman Catholic middle class emerged, sending its sons to university and into the professions. In 1829 the political dexterity of the Irish Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell achieved passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which finally repealed the Penal Laws and enabled Catholics to sit once again in the British Parliament. After reforms in Dublin’s municipal government, in 1841 O’Connell became the first Roman Catholic mayor of the city since the 17th century. For the first time in 200 years, Roman Catholic churches and schools were built, and in the 1850s the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College Dublin) opened on St. Stephen’s Green, with John Henry Newman as rector.

The first railway in Ireland was built in 1834, when a 7-mile (11.3-km) link connected Dublin with the port of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire). As a result, suburbs began to grow up along the coast to the south. Suburban development around the city continued and intensified over the next 70 years.

Although Dublin remained modestly prosperous on the surface, it was festering underneath. The city had some of the worst slums in Europe. Infant and child mortality rates were uncommonly high, with tuberculosis constituting a particular scourge; sanitation and hygiene were practically nonexistent. An investigation in 1910 revealed that 20,000 families were each living in just one room. A two-week survey of 22 public houses, or taverns, disclosed more than 46,000 women and 28,000 children among the customers.

As the 20th century opened, political tensions increased. In 1914 the Irish Party, through the Government of Ireland Act, secured Home Rule for the country, but when World War I erupted several months later, the act was suspended. For some years before the outbreak of the war, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB; popularly known as Fenians), who had been quiescent since the failure of their rebellion in 1867, had been secretly reorganizing. When war came they made plans for another rebellion against the British. With the help of the Irish Citizen Army, a small volunteer workingmen’s corps, and the Irish Volunteers (a militia partly under the influence of the IRB), a rebellion was launched on Easter Monday, 1916 (see Easter Rising). Leaders of the movement proclaimed an Irish Republic and formed a provisional government. The rebels occupied buildings in the centre of the city, which they held for a week. Commerce and industry came to a halt, and a quarter of the city’s population of 390,000 went on public relief.

Defeated, the surviving rebels were marched through the streets of Dublin to the jeers and abuse of the populace. But the establishment of martial law in Dublin, the execution of the leaders within 10 days, and the mass imprisonment of those thought to be implicated in the uprising roused Irish public opinion as the rebellion itself had not. Guerrilla warfare by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) spread through the country in 1919, continuing through two years of terror and counterterror. Dublin was one of the worst-affected areas in Ireland and for much of those two years was subject to martial law.

A compromise treaty was concluded in 1921 establishing the Irish Free State, but an antitreaty contingent of the IRA opposed it and took possession of the Four Courts building in 1922. That summer the rebels were driven out by force, an event that marked the start of 11 months of bloody civil war between the factions that were for and against the treaty. Once again Dublin suffered heavily in the conflict. The end of the civil war in 1923 did not mean the end of gunfire in the streets, however. Political assassinations and armed raids continued into the early 1930s, and hostilities remained a marked feature of Dublin life for more than a generation.

After national independence

Between 1922 and 1932 the first administrations of the new Irish Free State were preoccupied with trying to establish new government institutions and to repair the damage inflicted on the economy by the Troubles of 1916–23. Housing took a low priority, and it was not until the advent of Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government in 1932 that a concerted program of home building got under way. Some of the worst inner-city slums were cleared, and the residents were moved to new housing projects on the city’s outskirts. With the introduction of better health care, old-age pensions, and children’s allowances, the condition of Dublin’s poor began to improve.

The outbreak of World War II halted housing construction because of a shortage of building material, much of which was imported. As Ireland remained neutral, Dublin escaped the worst effects of the war, although there were isolated German bombing incidents. Food, with some exceptions, was plentiful, but the scarcity of gasoline made private transportation nonexistent and severely limited public transportation. Politically, Dublin had the mysterious atmosphere of other neutral “whispering galleries” such as Madrid and Lisbon, heightened by the presence of both Allied and Axis diplomats.

After the war, as shortages eased, new suburbs began to spread. In 1969 high-rise apartment blocks were built in new satellite developments in the towns of Ballymun and Ballyfermot; unfortunately, these proved no more immune to the crime and vandalism that plagued such buildings practically everywhere. Recognizing this, in the early 21st century Dublin City Council approved the demolition of nearly all the tower buildings in Ballymun as part of a new civic development.

The surge in building was a symbol of the prosperity that rejuvenated the city in the 1960s and ’70s. Tourism started to become a major industry, and Ireland’s membership in the EU brought more international organizations and firms to the city. Fighting in Northern Ireland in the 1970s spilled over to Dublin in February 1972 when a crowd protesting the Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry burned down the British embassy in Merrion Square. In July 1976 the British ambassador and a young assistant were murdered in Sandymount Sandyford by the IRA as they drove to work. Development slowed with the onset of the economic recession in the early 1980s, but it quickened again as the economy improved later in the decade. By the mid-1990s Ireland, whose robust economy earned it the nickname the “Celtic Tiger,” was flourishing, and this drove a further revival and new construction in Dublin.

The social and economic changes that came about after the end of World War II inevitably put pressure on historic Dublin, and an energetic conservation movement developed. In 1988 Dublin celebrated its millennium, arousing much thought and comment about its past and future, especially concerning the quality of its urban life. The city’s regeneration was recognized in 1991, when Dublin was designated that year’s European City of Culture.