Dublin Festival of History Podcast

This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, is the 28th annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture, delivered by Professor Diarmaid Ferriter of University College Dublin on the Dublin playwright Seán O’Casey; his formative years and what influenced his work, which incorporates so much of the social, cultural & political history of early twentieth century Dublin. This episode...

This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, celebrates the charismatic Fulvia who amassed a degree of military and political power that was unprecedented for a woman in Ancient Rome. Acclaimed historian Jane Draycott has used original sources to piece together Fulvia’s life and sort fact from fiction, while also exploring the role of women in Roman society. This episode was recorded at...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, author Anthony McElligott talks about his book The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean, and why the timing of the transport raises important questions in relation to long-term ideological Nazi goals and the immediate contingency thrown up by war. This episode was recorded at the Round Room in the Mansion House, on 28th Sept...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, author Kate Vigurs tells the stories of the lesser-known women who worked across Europe, from the Netherlands to Belgium and Poland to Denmark, recruited by Britain's Special Operations Executive in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Europe. This episode was recorded at the Round Room in the Mansion House, on 28th September, 2025. Hosted on...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, Dr Christina Wade looks at the history of beer alongside some of the biggest events in the story of Ireland, as explored in her book titled ‘Filthy Queens: A History of Beer in Ireland’. Christina is a co-host of the Beer Ladies Podcast. This was first published as an online talk, recorded on 30th September 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast...

This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2025, discusses the common revolutionary sentiments in Ireland and India in the struggle against British occupation. The Easter Rising of 1916 encouraged freedom fighters in India, just as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar in India in 1919 horrified the Irish public. Insensitive statements made by General Dyer during his trial were condemne...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin, examines how Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. Making Empire...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, discusses the turbulent and troubled history of the last 50 years in Ireland. The country has seen violence in Northern Ireland, the collapse of the economy and bailout of the banks, the exposure of shocking abuse perpetrated by the Catholic Church and n...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, author Roland Phillips discusses his book Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement, chronicling the life and legacy of the British diplomat and Irish rebel executed for high treason. This conversation was chaired by author, researcher...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, is about the Boundary Commission set up in 1924, to determine the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Dublin City Historian in Residence, Cormac Moore discusses the effects of the commission with Margaret O’Callaghan and Ed Burke,...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, Irish broadcaster and author of Land Is All That Matters, Myles Dungan, examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. This episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 28th Septem...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. This episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2024, celebrates the Atlas of the Irish Civil War, the latest volume in the award-winning Atlas Series. It presents fresh perspectives on, and a nuanced understanding of, the history of the Irish Civil War (1922–3). Speakers are Hélène O’Keeffe, Donal Ó Drisce...

In this episode from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Peter Sheridan marks the centenary of the birth of the writer Brendan Behan. Raised in Dublin’s north inner city and with strong connections to Dublin’s tenements, Behan is regarded as one of the greatest Irish writers and poets of all time. Sheridan discusses his engagement with the work of Behan and his career more broadly. Peter Sheridan...

In this episode from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Dublin City Council Historian in Residence, Dr Mary Muldowney, will discuss the 40th anniversary of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, including a comparison with the successful campaign for Repeal of the 8th.  The fifth anniversary of that Referendum was on May 25 and the signing of Repeal into law took place on September 18, 2018...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Kathryn Milligan discusses the work of artist Harry Kernoff. Born in London on the 9th of January 1900, Harry Aaron Kernoff was a prolific figure in twentieth century Irish art. Well regarded for his portraiture and landscape painting, Kernoff often focused on the depiction of Dublin, a city with which he became intimately familiar with, a...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Enda Finnan examines the Navan Road parish area and the transformation of the rural community and landscapes of the townlands of Greater Cabragh, Ashtown and Pelletstown from the 1920s to the 1960s. He connects the dots between migration and change of land ownership and development. Enda Finnan is a local resident and historian. This...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Francis Thackaberry explores the  attitudes and responses to poverty in eighteenth-century Dublin. The citizens of prosperous Georgian Dublin, associated poverty with idleness, disease and moral decay and sought ways to prevent ‘foreign’ vagrants from ‘infesting’ the city. One response was to found Dublin’s first tax-funded workhouse...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Fergus Whelan remembers the revolutionary and poet Dr William Drennan (1754-1820). Dr Drennan, a onetime elder of the Dublin Unitarian Church congregation, was born the son of a unitarian minister and made his life’s work the building of ‘a Brotherhood of Affection to Break Down the Brazen Walls of Separation’ which had been erected betwee...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Aodh Quinlivan illustrates the strained relationship between the Irish Free State and Dublin Corporation, which was central to his recent study. He examines how after the Civil War, the Corporation continued to irritate the central Government and how the dissolution of Dublin Corporation came to be. Aodh Quinlivan is an author and senior l...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Anne Chambers tells us about Lord Sligo - from a youth of hedonistic self-indulgence in Regency England, to a reforming, responsible legislator and landlord, Sligo became enshrined in the history of Jamaica as ‘Emancipator of the Slaves’ and in Ireland as ‘The Poor Man’s Friend’. Anne Chambers is a biographer, novelist, and screenwriter.&n...

In this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Ann Marie Durkan will introduce the maps she prepared, which locate animals and animal-related businesses in Dublin City in 1911. It provides an insight into how in 1901, 803 Dubliners worked as cattle dealers, drovers, farriers and vets, yet over the course of the 20th century most of these animals, and most of these jobs, disappeared. An...

In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relat...

The large influx of fugitive Nazis and collaborators in post-WWII Argentina created an environment that normalised the presence of such heinous criminals in society and by doing so facilitated the crimes of Argentina’s own genocidal dictatorship in 1976-83. During the research for his book ‘The Real Odessa’ on the escape of Nazi war criminals, author Uki Goñi was surprised to discover that so...

On the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Peter Taylor tells for the first time the gripping story of Operation Chiffon, MI5’s top secret intelligence operation that helped bring peace to Ireland. The conversation was hosted by journalist Susan McKay. The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dub...

Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle chronicles the history and reminiscences in a part of Dublin rich in the memories of its people.  Recently republished, this history of the Monto district from Terry Fagan of the North Inner-City Folklore Project draws on rich oral history collections from the area, explaining how Dublin’s Monto came to be, and why it lasted for so long. Terry Fagan is a...