Preface

Ireland cannot let go. A fixation with its own baggage is the context in which the media invent some new scandal from time to time, and why this scandal is aired on Liveline, a popular but unusual programme in which the scabs of middle Ireland are picked on live radio. The host of the show, Joe Duffy, is himself a part-time historian, which makes sense in a country with no border between history and current affairs. Recently, one of these tiffs – about Ireland’s imperial past –prompted Professor Jane Ohlmeyer to write a testy article for The Irish Times:

Ireland was England’s first colony. We lived as part of the English, and then British, Empire for over 700 years. The Normans first conquered Ireland in 1169 and aside from a brief decade of independence during the 1640s Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, until 1922 and the foundation of the modern state. As well as being colonised the Irish operated as active colonists in the empires of Britain and other European powers.

In employing such language, Ohlmeyer had a clear sense of her audience: liberal, self-critical, metropolitan. Irish Times readers were unlikely to take offence at the ‘active colonists’ part of her shtick. As the article would not be seen by the plain people of Ireland, the historian would not be attacked on Liveline for the crime of blunt speech.

The Irish people are obsessed with the past while seldom considering the vast sweep of all that history because they are not taught English history. It is particularly hard to understand the story of the Irish capital without first considering the experience of the people who live in what is now called England. To understand Dublin, you must first look east.

When the Normans conquered the south of England in 1066, they faced periodic rebellion in the north of England and the Celtic nations, areas that are sometimes called Outer Britain. The south had the better land, the better climate and a quick boat to Europe. It was richer and more prosperous than Outer Britain, and the most recent outbursts of English nationalism can be traced to this ancient gripe.

The history of Ireland, and in particular the history of Dublin, must be seen in that broader context to understand why the ‘English’, with their own experience of being colonised by the ‘French’, would try to annex ‘Ireland’ in the twelfth century. (The inverted commas indicate the looseness of these terms –they are not historically accurate – but the point remains.)

As the inhabitants of England’s first colony, the Irish become role-players in a larger set of experiences, with each party struggling to forge its own destiny. It is the fate of all neighbours. England goes on to create an empire by practising a form of moral barbarism that is so polite they almost get away with it. And Dublin was the despised centre of the colonial project in Ireland.

When the Irish rugby team takes to the pitch in Twickenham, all that history crashes into the present. Equally, when a Corkman arrives in Dublin, the past is never far from top of mind. No wonder the quintessential Dublin author James Joyce – the son of a Corkman – called Irish history ‘a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.

Turning away from the convoluted reality of the past is one response to all this head-spinning history. Leaving town is another. It was Joyce who observed that the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead. But one cannot make sense of Dublin without at least trying to engage with the past. One of the reasons why his masterpiece, Ulysses, is so compelling is because Joyce is intimate with the complications of all that history. His position as an Irish nationalist artist who made his home in Europe encouraged him to see the bigger picture: that eclecticism is a signal virtue of the great Dublin novel. In this epic account of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a half-Jewish Dubliner, the reader recognises why the story of the city demands to be seen in the broadest possible context. The first great multi-hyphenated Dubliner was not Bloom but Joyce himself.

A century after the publication of Ulysses, the Irish village that became a Viking town and an English city is the capital of a mature, independent European republic. This short book tells the story of the Hibernian metropolis from its foundation as a village on the banks of the Liffey to its position as the prosperous, multi-ethnic capital of a take-me-for-granted democracy.

Books are the family business. Dublin is particularly well served by its biographers, and the author has consulted many great doorstop histories. This is not that sort of book. Designed to be read in an afternoon, this long-short history invites the reader to bring the fullness of time and space to mind – in a single gulp – to measure the scale of a place and its people, occasionally at the same reckless speed as the mannerless seagulls that have colonised St Stephen’s Green.

All cities are the remnants of people who had to make room for other people. This book sees Dublin through the eyes of Irish, Viking, Anglo-Norman, Huguenot, Quaker and Jewish Dubliners. New blood can change the way we see ourselves, but outsiders can also come from within: from James Joyce to Mary Robinson, this account salutes individuals who have tried to make something more beautiful and more just than an ordinary city.

All manuscripts represent a working out.1 In this case, the text unpicks the very different stories of Ireland and Dublin. How could a capital be so alien to the state it represents? One answer is that Dublin is an only child, with its own character. Sui generis. The playwright Christine Longford wrote that ‘its history is not that of Ireland’. But it is also true, as we shall see, that Dubliners are related to everyone. Understanding them will require some flexibility.

The author claims no special licence. As books are central to the story of Dublin, writing a book about Dublin is perhaps the most Dublin thing to do in the world (apart, that is, from talking about writing a book about Dublin). However, this text certainly reflects the author’s experience of working in a museum that tells the story of Dublin in twenty-nine minutes, nine times a day, seven days a week. Speed is not just a virtue in the Little Museum. It is a condition of doing business.

1 In these footnotes the diligent reader can expect more history and a few bits of gossip, because Dublin ‘is a city of talkers,’ as Christine Longford wrote in her biography of the city.

So let’s get going.

Coming up, 1,500 years in less than 1,500 words: an incomplete history of Dublin in the time it takes to walk the length of O’Connell Street.

The reader is invited to take a deep breath.