Timeline of Dublin

Ptolemy maps a settlement called Eblana. The Alexandrian geographer’s map of Ireland marks a place called Eblana on the east coast, roughly where Dublin is. Whether it is Dublin, or a settlement nearby, has been argued about for centuries. It is the first written trace of anything here.

The Vikings build a longphort. Norse raiders establish a fortified ship harbour at the confluence of the Liffey and the Poddle, where a tidal pool gave the place its name — dubh linn, the black pool. It becomes one of the largest slave markets in western Europe.

The conventional founding date. Máel Sechnaill II of Meath takes the Norse town and imposes a tax. Dublin’s millennium was celebrated in 1988 on this basis, which is a choice of date rather than a settled fact — the town was already 150 years old.

The Battle of Clontarf. Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, defeats a Norse-Leinster alliance north of the city and is killed in the battle. It is remembered as the moment the Vikings were expelled, which is not what happened — Norse Dublin continued much as before.

Christ Church is founded. Sitric Silkenbeard, the Norse-Gael king of Dublin, founds a wooden church on the ridge above the settlement. It is the origin of Christ Church Cathedral and the oldest institution in the city.

Strongbow takes Dublin. Richard de Clare, invited by the deposed king of Leinster, storms the city with an Anglo-Norman force. Henry II arrives the following year to prevent his barons founding an independent kingdom, and Dublin becomes the seat of English administration in Ireland.

Dublin Castle is begun. King John orders a castle built to defend the city and hold the treasury. It remains the centre of English and then British rule in Ireland for over seven hundred years, until it is handed over in 1922.

The Black Death reaches the city. Plague arrives at Howth and Dalkey and kills perhaps a third of Dublin’s population within a year. Mass graves at Blackpitts, in the Liberties, gave that area its name.

Trinity College is founded. Elizabeth I charters a university on the site of a dissolved monastery outside the walls. Catholics are barred from taking degrees until 1793, and the Catholic Church discourages attendance until 1970.

Cromwell lands in Dublin. Oliver Cromwell arrives with an army and uses the city as the base for a campaign whose consequences — massacre, confiscation and transplantation — shape Irish land ownership and Irish memory for centuries.

Marsh’s Library opens. The first public library in Ireland opens beside St Patrick’s Cathedral, with dark oak stalls, chained books and wired alcoves in which readers were locked with rare volumes. It survives entirely unaltered.

The Georgian building boom. The Wide Streets Commission and a series of aristocratic developers lay out the squares — Merrion, Fitzwilliam, Mountjoy — and the streets that give central Dublin its shape. At its height the city is the second of the British Empire.

Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000-year lease. A four-acre disused brewery at St James’s Gate is leased at £45 a year for nine millennia. Within a century the operation is the largest brewery in the world and the largest employer in Dublin.

Grattan’s Parliament. Legislative independence is won for the Irish Parliament at College Green. It lasts eighteen years, is restricted to the Protestant Ascendancy, and produces the building that is now the Bank of Ireland.

The Custom House is completed. James Gandon’s building on the north quays, and the finest thing in Georgian Dublin. It is burned out by the IRA in 1921 and rebuilt.

The United Irishmen rebel. A rising inspired by the American and French revolutions, aiming at a non-sectarian republic, is put down with severity. Its failure produces the Act of Union.

The Act of Union. The Irish Parliament abolishes itself and Ireland is governed directly from Westminster. The aristocracy leaves for London, the money goes with them, and Dublin’s Georgian houses begin their conversion into tenements almost immediately.

Robert Emmet is executed. A brief and badly organised rising ends with Emmet hanged, drawn and quartered outside St Catherine’s Church on Thomas Street. His speech from the dock — asking that his epitaph not be written until Ireland is free — is memorised by generations of schoolchildren.

The Great Famine begins. Potato blight arrives. Over seven years around a million people die and a million more emigrate. Dublin fills with rural destitute, and the population of the island has never recovered to its pre-Famine level.

Glasnevin Cemetery is a decade old. Daniel O’Connell’s cemetery, founded in 1832 so that Catholics could be buried with their own rites, is open to people of all religions and none. It now holds around 1.5 million people — more than the current population of Dublin.

The Abbey Theatre opens. Yeats and Lady Gregory found a national theatre to show Ireland to itself in its own voice. Its audiences riot over Synge in 1907 and O’Casey in 1926, and both plays are now canonical.

The day Ulysses is set. Joyce sets his novel on a single ordinary Dublin day — the date of his first walk out with Nora Barnacle. It is now marked annually as Bloomsday, with readings, walks and a great deal of Edwardian dress.

The Lockout. Twenty thousand workers are locked out by their employers for eight months over the right to unionise. It is the most severe industrial dispute in Irish history, and it happens in a city with some of the worst slums in Europe.

The Easter Rising. Around 1,200 volunteers seize buildings across the centre and proclaim a republic from the GPO. Six days of fighting, artillery on Sackville Street, and around 485 dead, more than half of them civilians.

The executions at Kilmainham. Fifteen leaders are shot by firing squad over ten days, one at a time. James Connolly, unable to stand, is tied to a chair. The drip of executions turns public opinion decisively, and within two years Sinn Féin sweeps the general election.

The First Dáil and the War of Independence. Elected Sinn Féin members convene their own parliament at the Mansion House rather than take their Westminster seats. The war begins the same day.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Treaty grants dominion status to twenty-six counties and partitions the island. It splits the independence movement and leads directly to civil war.

Dublin Castle is handed over. Michael Collins accepts the surrender of the castle after seven hundred years of English and British administration. The Civil War begins five months later with the shelling of the Four Courts.

The Eucharistic Congress. Over a million people attend Mass in Phoenix Park — around a quarter of the population of the island. It marks the arrival of the Catholic Church at the centre of the new state’s identity.

Kennedy visits, and tenements collapse. President Kennedy’s visit is the high point of the year. Weeks earlier two tenements collapsed in Bolton Street and Fenian Street, killing four people, and forcing a housing programme that clears much of the old inner city.

The Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Three car bombs in Dublin and one in Monaghan kill 34 people — the highest death toll of any day in the Troubles. Nobody has ever been prosecuted.

Wood Quay is concreted over. Twenty thousand people march to save the largest Viking site in Europe, uncovered during construction of the city’s civic offices. The offices are built anyway. It is the largest heritage protest in Irish history and it fails.

Dublin’s millennium. The city celebrates a thousand years on a debatable date, and uses the occasion to begin the regeneration of Temple Bar — which had been earmarked for demolition as a bus depot.

The Celtic Tiger begins. Foreign investment, EU funds, an educated young workforce and low corporation tax produce a decade of extraordinary growth. Ireland goes from emigration to immigration inside ten years, and Dublin changes faster than at any time since the Georgians.

The crash. The property bubble bursts, the banks are guaranteed by the state, and Ireland enters a bailout in 2010. Emigration resumes. The cranes stop for six years.

The marriage referendum. Ireland becomes the first country in the world to introduce same-sex marriage by popular vote. Dublin Castle’s courtyard, where the count is announced, fills with people who had flown home to vote.

The Eighth Amendment is repealed. A second referendum liberalises abortion law by a two-thirds majority. Together with 2015 it marks the end of the Church’s authority over Irish social legislation, a century after the state was founded on it.

The city empties. Covid-19 closes the pubs for the longest period of any country in Europe. Outdoor tables and pedestrianised streets appear as a temporary measure and several of them stay.