Dublin Festival of History Podcast

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.

This episode was recorded at Central Library on September 28, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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, after the Kernoff family moved there in 1914.

 Kathryn Milligan is the author of ‘Painting Dublin, 1886-1949: Visualising a Changing City’.

This episode was recorded at Pearse Street Library, on October 9, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 episode was recorded at Cabra Library, on October 12, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 James’s Street in 1703. 

Francis Thackaberry is a former teacher, journalist, and arts administrator.  

This episode was recorded at 14 Henrietta Street, on October 9, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 between ‘Irishmen by Distinctions of Rank, Property and Religious Persuasion’.

Fergus Whelan is the author of ‘May Tyrants Tremble’.

This episode was recorded at the Dublin Unitarian Church, on September 28, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 lecturer.

This episode was recorded at the Mansion House on September 27, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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. 

This episode was recorded at the Central Library, on October 4, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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. Ann Marie Durkan is an Irish Research Council funded PhD candidate in Dublin City University.

This episode was recorded at the Central Library, on October 3, 2023.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 some escaped first to Ireland from where they made their way to Argentina.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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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 historian and tour guide with a particular interest in the north inner-city.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Historian Fergus Whelan will discuss the life of writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights Mary Wollstonecraft, her impact on the life of Margaret King of 15 Henrietta Street, and the links that bound the two women, even after Wollstonecraft’s untimely death.

This talk is a collaboration between 14 Henrietta Street and Na Píobairí Uilleann.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Dublin City Library and Archive hosts a lecture with David Dickson, titled ‘Dublin v. Cork: A Tale of Two Eighteenth-Century Cities’

To citizens of Dublin, their city has always been unquestionably the most important urban centre in the country. To citizens of Cork, this has never been entirely accepted. In the eighteenth century both cities far outgrew their medieval shells to become major European ports, each with a vastly expanded population. But they remained very different places, Dublin the political centre and a ‘court city’, Cork the commercial centre and a ‘merchant city’.

Does this explain why in the tumultuous politics of the 1790s things turned out so very differently in the two cities?

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History Podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council.

In this episode from the 2021 Dublin Festival of History, we hear from practitioners who have worked on LGBTQ+ in public history, from grassroots projects to archives and museums.

The speakers are Richard O’Leary, Maurice J Casey and Kate Drinane. The moderator is Sara Phillips.

The episode was recorded at The Printworks, Dublin Castle on the 10th of October 2021.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Donal Fallon speaks to two writers who have written recent books on the history of Dublin.

In O’Connell Street: The History and Life of Dublin’s Iconic Street, Nicola Pierce explores the people, the history, the buildings and the stories behind the main street in our capital.

Kathryn Milligan’s Painting Dublin, 1886-1949: Visualising a Changing City represents the first detailed study of the depiction of Dublin in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. It demonstrates the important role played by the portrayal and experience of urban life, a role shaped by huge historical, political, and social change.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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George III, Britain’s longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as ‘the cruellest tyrant of this age’. Andrew Roberts’s new biography takes entirely the opposite view. It portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong sense of honour and duty.

He was a devoted husband and family man, a great patron of the arts and sciences, keen to advance Britain’s agricultural capacity (‘Farmer George’) and determined that her horizons should be global. He could be stubborn and self-righteous, but he was also brave, brushing aside numerous assassination attempts, galvanising his ministers and generals at moments of crisis and stoical in the face of his descent – five times during his life – into a horrifying loss of mind.

Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Lisa Marie Griffith is author of ‘Dublin: Then and Now’ and ‘Stones of Dublin: A History of Dublin in Ten Buildings’ and has published a number of essays on Dublin history. She is co-editor of two edited collections of essays, ‘Leaders of the City: Dublin’s first citizens, 1500–1950’ and ‘Death and Dying in Dublin: 1500 to the Present’.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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On a sunlit evening in 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon’s blades.

The murders ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A new spirit of goodwill had been burgeoning between Prime Minister William Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell, with both men forging in secret a pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland – with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protégé, to play an instrumental role.

The impact of the Phoenix Park murders was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the pact, almost brought down the government and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century.

Julie Kavanagh is a renowned journalist, former New Yorker London editor, former arts editor of Harpers & Queen and Costa Biography Award finalist.

Roy Foster is a distinguished Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Twenty years on from her critically acclaimed book, ‘Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People’, Susan McKay talks again to the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. The book contains interviews with politicians, former paramilitaries, victims and survivors, business people, religious leaders, community workers, young people, writers and others. 

It tackles controversial issues, such as Brexit, paramilitary violence, the border, the legacy of the Troubles, same-sex marriage and abortion, RHI, and the possibility of a United Ireland, and explores social justice issues and campaigns, particularly the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights.

Susan McKay is an award-winning writer and commentator and contributes regularly to print and broadcast media, including Guardian/Observer, New York Times, Irish Times and London Review of Books.

Martin Doyle is Books Editor of the Irish Times.

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Myles Dungan’s family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915 and 1922. Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from County Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by a powerful rancher’s hired assassin; three more died in Ireland, and each death is compellingly reconstructed in this extraordinary book. Mark Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian ‘bandits’ who resented his family’s possession of some disputed acres; his killer was tried and executed by the dead man’s relatives and comrades in the Meath IRA. A mentally challenged youth was shot as an informer by another relative of Dungan’s, and buried in secrecy and silence.

Myles Dungan’s book, focused on one family, offers an original perspective on this still controversial period: a prism through which the moral and personal costs of violence, and the elemental conflict over land, come alive.

Myles Dungan is an Irish broadcaster and author. He has presented many arts programmes on RTÉ Radio, and has also been a sports broadcaster on RTÉ Television. Since October 2010 he has been the presenter of “The History Show” on RTÉ Radio One.

Catriona Crowe is one of Ireland’s leading historians and commentators. She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2012.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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At the end of the Irish War of Independence, Dublin signed an unsatisfactory treaty with London, that amongst other things, required oaths of allegiance to the British Empire. To many this was a price worth paying, but for others it was impossible. Very quickly, in 1922 the country collapsed into a cruel civil war that split organisations like Sinn Fein and the IRA, local communities, and families.

It was less devastating than some other European civil wars but it left a ghastly number of dead, injured and immiserated across Ireland, north and south. And it cast a long shadow across Ireland.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two parties that grew out of the rival factions, have ruled Ireland since the end of the civil war. It was only in 2019 – almost a century after the conflict – because of Sinn Fein’s electoral success that the two parties could see their way to officially working together. Drawing on completely new sources, Ireland’s most brilliant historian shows how important this tragic war was for understanding Ireland now.

Diarmaid Ferriter has been Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD since 2008. He is a weekly columnist for The Irish Times and in March 2019, was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Ronan McGreevy is a news reporter with The Irish Times.  He is the editor of ‘Centenary, Ireland Remembers 1916’, the official State book recalling the commemorations of 2016.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Before 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France – all without destroying itself in the process?

In a unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. It is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian specializing in modern German history. She was born in East Germany and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London .

Roger Moorhouse began his writing career working for Professor Norman Davies and has since written several highly successful books on aspects of the Third Reich.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Iain McGregor’s book is a powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin. East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill.

Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempted to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it. In November 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades.

Iain McGregor is a successful editor of non fiction for major publishing houses, working with talented and bestselling historians such as Michael Wood, Sir Simon Schama, William Taubman, Alice Roberts and John Nichol – as well as publishing tie-ins with archives and podcasts such as the Imperial War Museum and R4’s ‘In Our Time’ series with Melvyn Bragg. He is also a writer and public speaker on modern history and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Jane Freeland is a historian of feminism and gender in modern Germany at the German Historical Institute London.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology – East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish.

The Best Catholics in the World is the remarkable result of his three-year journey. With wit, wisdom and compassion Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland.

Derek Scally has written for the Irish Times since 2000. He is based in Berlin. The Best Catholics in the World is his first book.

Rachael English is a journalist and writer. She is presenter of Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1. Her latest book, The Paper Bracelet, is published by Hachette UK.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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In 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists.

Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol, England. Robert E. Lee was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Christopher Columbus was toppled in Minnesota, beheaded in Massachusetts, and thrown into a lake in Virginia. King Leopold II of the Belgians was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill was daubed with the word ‘racist’ in London.

Statues are one of the most visible – and controversial – forms of historical storytelling. The stories we tell about history are vital to how we, as societies, understand our past and create our future. Fallen Idols looks at twelve statues in modern history. It looks at why they were put up; the stories they were supposed to tell; why those stories were challenged; and how they came down.

Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian and screenwriter. She is the author of five books on Cold War politics and cultural history, most recently Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.

Hugh Linehan is Culture Editor with the Irish Times.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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Ireland is a nation obsessed with death. We find a thrill in the moribund, a strange enchantment in the drama of our dark past. It’s everywhere we look and in all of our beloved myths, songs and stories that have helped to form our cultural identity. Our wakes and ballads, our plays and famine sites, all of them and more come together to tell ourselves and the world who we are and what we have suffered to get here. 

Always fascinated by the Irish preoccupation with death and the rituals around it, Gillian sets out to explore this intriguing habit of ours, to be compelled to celebrate the macabre and relish the darkness of own mortality. In The Darkness Echoing she tours Ireland to find our most haunted and fascinating historical sites, to discover the stories behind them and reveal what they say about Ireland as a nation.

Dr Gillian O’Brien is a Reader in Modern Irish History at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago.

Michael Staunton is a medieval historian and Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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In the annals of the Third Reich, little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis’ rise to power. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s.

As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility’s social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years.

Stephan Malinowski teaches Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh. Born and raised in Berlin, he is one of Germany’s leading experts on the history of the German nobility in the 20th century.

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD and Director of its Centre for War Studies.

This event was organised in collaboration with the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland.

The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

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The 1921 partition of Ireland had huge ramifications for almost all aspects of Irish life and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths and injuries, with thousands displaced from their homes and many more forced from their jobs. Two new justice systems were created; the effects on the major religions were profound, with both jurisdictions adopting wholly different approaches; and major disruptions were caused in crossing the border, with invasive checks and stops becoming the norm.

Very little has been written on the actual effects of partition, the-day-to-day implications, and the complex ways that society, north and south, was truly and meaningfully affected. Cormac Moore's Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland is the most comprehensive account to date on the far-reaching effects of the partitioning of Ireland.

In this episode author and Dublin City Council historian-in-residence Cormac Moore explains how the partition of Ireland in 1920 came about. The questions are asked by Deputy City Librarian Brendan Teeling and episode was recorded via Zoom on the 3rd October 2021.

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Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. In this ambitious history, that spans the Bronze Age to the coming of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Greg Jenner assembles a vibrant cast of over 125 actors, singers, dancers, sportspeople, freaks, demigods, ruffians, and more, in search of celebrity’s historical roots.

In this episode from the 2020 Dublin Festival of History, public historian, broadcaster, and author Greg Jenner talks about his book Dead Famous: an unexpected history of celebrity. The episode is moderated by author and journalist Anna Carey and was recorded via Zoom on the 1st October 2021

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On the brink of defeat, Hitler commissioned 10,000 V2s - ballistic rockets that carried a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound, which he believed would win the war.

Dr Rudi Graf who, along with his friend Werner von Braun, had once dreamt of sending a rocket to the moon, now finds himself in November 1944 in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland, launching V2s against London. Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the WAAF, has experienced first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. When 160 Londoners, mostly women and children, are killed by a single missile, the government decides to send a team of WAAFs to newly-liberated Belgium in the hope of discovering the location of the launch sites. But not all the Germans have left and Kay finds herself in mortal danger.

In this episode best-selling author Robert Harris returns to the Festival to talk about his book V2, the story of the deadliest rockets of the Second World War. The episode is moderated by journalist and broadcaster Edel Coffey and was recorded via Zoom on the 27th September 2020

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After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala Glass and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz.

A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the 20th century as they each make their own bid for survival, House of Glass explores assimilation, identity and home – issues that are deeply relevant today.

In this episode journalist and author Hadley Freeman discusses her book ‘House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family'. The episode is moderated by journalist Sarah Carey and was recorded via Zoom on the 25th September 2020.

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In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euphoria evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared, extremism rose once more and eventually - as this book compellingly relates - the relationships soured too.

Anne Applebaum traces this history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics becomes polarized, which side do you back? 

In this episode Anne Applebaum returns to the Festival to talk about her book Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. Anne is in conversation with Paschal Donohue, TD, Ireland's Minister for Finance and President of the EuroGroup. The questions are asked by Deputy City Librarian Brendan Teeling, and the episode was recorded via Zoom on the 3rd October 2021.

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At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. In The Hitler Years ~ Disaster 1940-1945, Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich, and challenges long-held accounts of the Holocaust and Germany's ultimate defeat.

In this special episode historian Professor Frank McDonough returns to the Festival to talk about his book The Hitler Years: Disaster 1940-1945, the second volume in his history of the Third Reich. Frank is in conversation with actor, and voice of the audiobook, Paul McGann. The episode was recorded via Zoom on 4th December 2021.

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In The Ratline, his riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadefuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War.

In this episode Philippe Sands talks about The Ratline with UCD's Professor Robert Gerwarth. This event was presented in co-operation with the Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland and was recorded via Zoom on the 4th October 2021.

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At 9am on the morning of 21 November 1920, Michael Collins’ IRA gunmen killed 15 suspected British intelligence officers at various sites across Dublin City. In the afternoon Crown forces opened fire on the crowd at a Dublin v Tipperary Gaelic football match in Croke Park killing 14 people, including 3 children and a Tipperary player.

John Borgonovo and Michael Foley discuss the events of a day that changed Ireland forever.

Author of The Bloodied Field, which tells the story of what happened in Croke Park that day, Michael Foleyis a journalist and author..

John Borgonovoteaches history at University College Cork and has written extensively on the Civil War period.

Padraig Yeates is a distinguished social and labour historian and the author of City in Revolution which was published in 2014.

Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle on 26 September 2015.

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In 1914 a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world had collapsed into a savagery beyond any comparison. In 1939 Europeans initiated a second conflict that managed to be even worse, a war in which the killing of civilians was central and which culminated in the Holocaust. We are delighted to welcome one of Britain’s greatest historians to discuss what it meant for the Europeans who initiated and lived through such fearful times. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017.

Sir Ian Kershaw’s work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world’s leading experts on the Third Reich, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD.

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The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers – to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world, thousands of individuals – including many Irish emigrants – took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years in the UK, sending much of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed and transformed the country. Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017.

Clair Wills teaches at Princeton University in the USA. Her books include Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO and The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and PostWar Irish Culture.

Elaine Sisson is a cultural historian, writer, and lecturer, at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.

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The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political foment in Russia in the aftermath of Alexander Kerensky’s February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the beginnings of Lenin’s Soviet republic. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017.

Robert Service is a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has written biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and several other books on Russia past and present.

Patrick Geoghegan is Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin.

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Our expect panel answer questions from the audience on a whole range of historical topics,with Joe Duffy keeping order, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017.

Catriona Croweis former head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. In 2016 she presented the RTE documentary Life Before the Rising .

Donal Fallon is a Dublin-based historian, publisher of the Three Castles Burning podcast, and worked as an Historian in Residence with Dublin City Council.

Dr Jennifer Wellington is a lecturer in Modern History at University College Dublin.

Joe Duffy is the presenter of RTE’s Liveline radio series. He is the author of the bestselling Children of the Rising, and co-author, with Freya Clements, of Children of the Troubles.

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In its centenary year the sheer apocalyptic scale of the Russian Revolution seems almost to defy comprehension. What began as a challenge to the decadence and complacency of the Romanov dynasty ended up in the slaughter of millions and the subjugation of an entire people. History has consigned the revolution to the tomb and celebrated its death but what, if anything, remains of the elevated goals and ideals which inspired it? Was the poison of Stalinism in Bolshevism from the beginning? Can it teach us anything one hundred years on and if so what?

Our panel of experts examines these and other questions, featuring David Aaronovitch, Maria Falina, Judith Devlin, and Geoffrey Roberts.

The epiode is chaired by Hugh Linehan of the Irish Times, and it was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 29th September 2017.

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The Darkening Age tells the story of how, between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD, the Christians of the late Roman Empire set out deliberately to destroy all the books, knowledge and temples of the ancient Roman and Greek worlds, killing pagan priests, burning libraries and erasing the wisdom of ages. All the great works that survived and prompted the Renaissance had to be translated back into European languages many centuries later from Arabic libraries. The Darkening Age brilliantly illuminates a dark and murky period of ancient history.

Catherine Nixey is a critic and commissioning editor on the arts desk at The Times of London.

Zuleika Rodgers is Director of the Herzog Centre in Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies.

The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 30th September 2017.

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Based on her book, The Private Lives of Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England, Dr Janina Ramirez, Oxford Art Historian and BBC broadcaster, will explore the incredible intellectual, artistic and spiritual results of the influence of Celtic and Roman Christianity on the newly converted Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. With stunning artworks like the Lindisfarne Gospels, Ruthwell Cross and Cuthbert Coffin emerging out of this cultural exchange, the talk will explore the ideas, individuals and artworks associated with this important time.

Janina Ramirez is a British art and cultural historian and TV presenter. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 30th September 2017.

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In the second volume of his ground-breaking World War 2 trilogy, James Holland describes how the tide of war began to turn against the Axis. Looking at the war from the battle front to the factories and shipyards, he tells the story of how, in the Battle of the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in the escalating bombing campaign of Nazi Germany, the Allies finally gained the upper hand. Here is an epic account of one of the most dramatic periods in history.

James Holland is a historian, writer, and broadcaster. He is also co-founder and Programme Director of the hugely successful Chalke Valley History Festival. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 30th September 2017.

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When Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the church door of a small university town in 1517, he set off a process that changed the Western world for ever. His attempts to reform Christianity by returning it to its biblical roots split the Western Church, divided Europe and polarised people’s beliefs, leading to religious persecution, social unrest and war; and in the long run his ideas would help break the grip of religion on every sphere of life.

Lyndal Roper is Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and author of the acclaimed biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 30th September 2017.

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September 1938. Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace. The issue is to be decided in a city that will forever afterwards be notorious for what takes place there – Munich.

Robert Harris’s spy thriller, Munich, set over the four days of the 1938 Munich Conference, confirms him as the pre-eminent historical novelist of our time. Robert Harris is the author of eleven bestselling novels including the Cicero Trilogy, Fatherland and An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

James Holland is a writer, broadcaster, and Second World War historian.

The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 29th September 2017.

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In a long and distinguished career, Chris Patten has been a Westminster MP, a UK Cabinet minister, the last Governor of Hong Kong, Chairman of the BBC and Chancellor of Oxford University. In this frank memoir he uses each phase of his life as a spur to reflect upon education, America, conservatism, Ireland, China, Europe and finally the question of links between violence and religion. Of particular interest to an Irish audience will be his stewardship of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland.

Chris Patten is currently Chancellor of Oxford University. Holding several high-ranking posts throughout his career, he has been at the centre of political life and world affairs for most of his life.

John Bowman is a historian and broadcaster.

The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 30th September 2017.

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The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, who for most of the twentieth century, were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that ‘One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country’, but there was far more to the Soong sisters than these caricatures. As China battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, each sister played an important, sometimes critical role, and left an indelible mark on history.

Best-selling writer and historian Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape the history of twentieth-century China.

The moderator is Isabella Jackson, Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Trinity College, Dublin, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 20th October 2019.

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In April 1919, at a political gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his soldiers into a walled garden, filled with thousands of unarmed men, women and children. Then, blocking the only exit and without issuing any order to disperse, he instructed his men to turn their guns on the thickest parts of the crowd. For ten minutes, they continued firing, stopping only when 1,650 bullets had been fired. Not a single shot was fired in retaliation. According to legend, a young, low-caste survivor, Udham Singh, vowed to kill the men responsible and in March 1940, in London, he finally seized his opportunity.

Television and radio presenterAnita Anand talks about her book The Patient Assassin, and the Irish connection to the massacre. The moderator is historian Dr. Kate O’Malley, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 20th October 2019.

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The ‘American Dream’ and ‘America First’ are two of the most loaded phrases in America today, and also two of the most misunderstood. The American Dream began as a pledge for equality rather than as a dream of supremacy. America First has not just served as an isolationist term, but as an early slogan of the Ku Klux Klan with surprising links to the present. In 1927, a KKK riot led to the arrest of seven men - among them a certain Fred C. Trump.

As America struggles again to project a shared vision, to itself and to the world, Sarah Churchwell, Chair in Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, argues that the meanings and history of these terms need to be

understood afresh so that the true spirit of America can be reclaimed.

The interviewer is journalist Sarah Carey, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 20th October 2019.

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For some commentators, ‘fake-history films’ are the new threat to truth, arguing that artistic licence is no excuse for distorting historical facts and yet contemporary movies change history all the time (Mary Queen of Scots meeting Queen Elizabeth on the big screen!). Film-makers, on the other hand, claim they are artists, not journalists or historians, and are not in the business of providing documentary-style history lessons. But at what point does artistic licence and creative dramatisation start to confuse and mislead the viewer? Is film a useful gateway to ‘real’ history?

Our panel debates the issues. Cecile Gordon is project manager of the Military Service (1916–1923) Pensions Collection; Hannah Greig is a senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and a historical adviser for film, television and theatre. and Tom Holland is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. Hugh Linehan, arts and culture editor of the Irish Times, chairs the discussion, recorded Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 20th October 2019.

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Nine-year-old Patrick Rooney loved horror movies and Hallowe’en and wanted to be a priest when he grew up. Instead, on 15th August 1969, he became the first child killed as a result of the ‘Troubles’ - one of approximately 190 children who would die in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

In their book, Children of the Troubles, broadcaster Joe Duffy and journalist Freya McClements tell the previously untold story of Northern Ireland’s lost children. They discuss the tragic stories of these lost young lives, many of them children who have never been publicly acknowledged as victims of the Troubles, with Martin Doyle of the Irish Times.

Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 20th October 2019

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Christianity is the most enduring legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable but widen the focus and Christianity’s enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism and even in atheism.

Tom Holland makes a welcome return to the Festival to discuss this book Dominion: the making of the western mind. The moderator is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College CD, Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019.

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Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars of 1914–18, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; failed above all to prevent another war.

Margaret MacMillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Emeritus Professor of International History and former warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later.

The moderator is historian Professor Robert Gerwath, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019.

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When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and change. The Soviet order collapsed in 1991, and Boris Yeltsin initiated a summer of transformation as Russia acquired a market economy and aspired to a new place in the world community. It was a season of achievement but also of disappointment, leading Yeltsin to relinquish the Russian presidency at the end of the century in favour of Vladimir Putin, his young prime minister. Under Putin’s rule, Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad. Bringing his expert knowledge of Russia’s history to the fore, Robert Service looks at the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future.

The moderator is journalist and author David McCullagh, and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019.

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In this episode from the 2019 Festival, historians Catriona Crowe and Donal Fallon present a selection of Great Irish Speeches, all of which have had a remarkable impact on the course of Irish and world history.

The speeches are performed by actors Cathy Belton and Bryan Murray. Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019.

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The Crusades - the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods. Crusading armies from European Christian states attempted to wrest the Holy Land from Islamic rule in wars which have left an enduring imprint on relations between the Muslim world and the West to this day. Hear tales soaked in Islamic, Christian and Jewish blood, peopled by extraordinary characters, and characterised by both low ambition and high principle.

In this episode from the 2019 Festival, Dan Jones, best-selling chronicler of the Middle Ages, writer, historian and TV presenter, talks about his book Crusaders with Trinity College Dublin historian Dr Conor Kostick, who has himself written about the crusades. Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019.

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Until recently, the Catholic Church, in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of ‘fallen women’. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted – sometimes illegally.

In this episode from the 2019 Festival, journalist Caelainn Hogan talks about her book Republic Of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s institutions for ‘Fallen Women’ with Terri Harrison and Peter Mulryan. The moderator is Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 18th October 2019.

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In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government. In a few months he installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his left-wing opponents, terrorising the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany was reborn as a brutal and determined European power intent on avenging the mythical ‘stab in the back’ of 1918.

In this episode from the 2019 Festival, historian Professor Frank McDonough talks about his book The Hitler Years, the first in a new two volume history of the Third Reich. The moderator is historian Dr Jennifer Wellington and the episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 18th October 2019.

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On 21st January 1919, the Soloheadbeg ambush in Tipperary set in train the Irish War of Independence which would lead in July 1921 to the Truce and then the Treaty setting up the Irish Free State. The actions of the poorly armed IRA succeeded where previous generations had failed in securing the end of British rule, albeit not in all of Ireland.

Was the war justified? Could Irish independence have been achieved by peaceful means? How should the war be remembered?

Historians Anne Dolan, John Dorney, and Diarmaid Ferriter discuss Ireland's War of Independence, chaired by journalist and author Ronan McGreevy. It was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 18th October 2019, and we join the conversation with Ronan McGreevy asking about perceptions of the conflict.

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In this episode Helen Rappaport talks about The Race to Save the Romanovs, with moderator Zuleika Rodgers, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 7th October 2018.

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In this episode historians Donal O Drisceoil, Helene O’Keeffe and John Borgonovo discuss the bestseller Atlas of the Irish Revolution, with moderator Catriona Crowe, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 7th October 2018.

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In this episode Richard Grayson talks about his book Dublin’s Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, with moderator Ronán MacGreevey, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 6th October 2018.

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In this episode Anne Applebaum talks about Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine with moderator Conor O'Clery, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 6th October 2018.

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In this episode Pamela Cox talks about her book Servants, shop girls and sex workers: a hidden history, with moderator with Sarah-Anne Buckley, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 6th October 2018.

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In this episode Clare Mulley talks about The Women who Flew for Hitler, with moderator Jennifer Wellington, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 7th October 2018.

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