Slavery, de-naming and re-naming..

Sadly throughout the history of our world slavery has always existed in some form or other. Dublin has experienced its share. There are tales that in Medieval times Gaelic Irish raiders crossed the Irish Sea to Roman Britain and kidnapping and enslaving people including a young St.Patrick.

When Vikings first raided our shores they plundered, pillaged and killed. They enslaved and deported us to foreign lands. They settled here and over several generations assimilating with the native population. With them we built a booming economy here, the central cornerstone of which was slavery and vassalage.

Ivar Ragnarsson, a Viking warlord came from area covering lands in modern Denmark and Sweden, founded a dynasty here and named it Dyflin, an old Norse name derived from 'black pool', in Irish 'Duib Linn' That refers to a black inlet of the River Liffey near where Dublin Castles is today. There they built hundreds of longships and from there sailed down the Liffey into the sea. Navigating across Europe and the Middle East they gathered thousands of slaves and shipped and sold them across the known world of the time. All of which helped shape the city we live in today. Years later another shaping of our capital took place, again associated with slavery. This time when Dublin and the areas surrounding it became the Pale, the seat of British power in Ireland. Indeed the nickname 'Dublin Jackeens' derives from the Union Jack. Now as part of the British Empire we had a renewed relationship with slavery mostly in British plantations. When Britain became the first country in Europe to abolished slavery, many slaveowners continued by purchasing slaves in other European plantations

Black lives matter

Recently the 'Black Lives Matter' movement triggered protests not just in the USA but across the world.

some apprehension. The management of the Shelbourne Hotel on St.Stephens Green took the precautionary measure of removing four neoclassical decorative statues from railings outside the hotel on the possibility they might conceivably be Nubian slaves in manacles. They were later reinstated when art historians agreed that far from being slaves, these 'manacles' were ornate anklets on four aristocratic young ladies.

Then in 2021 Trinity College began what they loftily called an examination of core decided to dename the Berkeley Library because of George Berkeley's association with slavery. Berkeley was Irish by birth, was educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College where he was multi awarded BA, MA, Fellow, later lecturer and librarian; took Holy Orders and returned to Trinity to lecture on divinity, later became a Church of Ireland Bishop, Dean of Dromore and Dean of Derry and... bought and sold slaves. Berkeley preferred to be known as Anglo-Irish, he considered the Irish to be a lessor people on a par with 'the negro' In his book 'The