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Parks are our breathing spaces in the city and this gallery recognises the beautiful green spaces around Dublin. Although it does not include every park and green space in Dublin, we hope it will provide an introduction to those places were Dubliners can take a moment to enjoy nature and to relax.

The Irish International Exhibition of 1907 happened because of the vision of one man, the commitment of another and the management skills of a third. Their names are William Dennehy, William Martin Murphy and James Shanks, together with many people who helped in the creation of the Exhibition, they made the Exhibition the sensation of 1907.

Listen to Aideen McBride telling the story of General Five Tiger.

What was it like to be a peasant, a potter or a poet in Medieval Dublin? Find out about these and others who made their living as miller, mason, man-of-law and more! What challenges and conflicts did they face? These interesting talks show how new research can help illuminate the lives of early Dubliners and allow us gain an insight into their lives. These talks are part of Tales of Medieval Dublin: A series of monthly lunchtime lectures which took place in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 at the Wood Quay Venue, Civic Offices, Wood Quay. The series was presented by the Friends of Medieval Dublin and Dublin City Council.You may also be interested in reading the Medieval Dublin Series, edited by Sean Duffy, produced by the Friends of Medieval Dublin and published by Four Courts Press. Full list of videos from this series:Milestones of Medieval Dublin 2013December 2013Silken Thomas and the Siege of Dublin by Steven EllisNovember 2013The Coronation of Lambert Simnel by Sparky BookerOctober 2013The Black Death by Gillian KennySeptember 2013The Bruce Invasion by Seymour PhillipsAugust 2013The Construction of Dublin Castle by Con ManningJuly 2013Dublin's First Coinage by Andy WoodsJune 2013Dublin's First Viking? by Linzi SimpsonTales of Medieval Dublin 2012December 2012The Poet's Tale by Katharine SimmsNovember 2012The Potter's Tale by Clare McCutcheonSeptember 2012The Crusader's Tale by Edward ColemanAugust 2012The Slave's Tale by Poul HolmJuly 2012The Duibh Linn(ers') Tale by Edmond O'DonovanJune 2012The Miller's Tale by Claire WalshTales of Medieval Dublin 2011December 2011The Notary's Tale by Caoimhe WhelanNovember 2011The Mason's Tale by Michael O'NeillNovember 2011The Archdeacon's Tale by Margaret MurphyAugust 2011The Peasant's Tale by Cherie PetersJuly 2011The Mother's Tale by Howard ClarkeJune 2011The Viking's Tale by Stephen HarrisonJanuary 2011The Knight's Tale: Sir Christopher St. Lawrence (died 1589 AD) by Sparky BookerTales of Medieval Dublin 2010November 2010The Heretic's Tale: Adam Duff O'Toole (died 1327 AD) by Bernadette WilliamsOctober 2010The Outlaw’s Tale: Henry Tyrel (fl. 1308 AD) by Áine FoleyAugust 2010The Merchant’s Tale: Roger Cordwainer (fl. 1200 AD) by Grace O'KeefeJuly 2010The Skeleton’s Tale: An Anonymous Viking Warrior (died c. 830 AD) by Linzi Simpson    

John Thomas Gilbert, born in Dublin on the 23rd January 1829, was the author of the influential three-volume 'History of the City of Dublin', published from 1854-59. He was a firm advocate of documenting the history of his native city using primary sources.

This gallery is a tribute to an animal which has been a friend to Dubliners through the centuries. Whether as a working horse, a military high-stepper, a means of transport or simply a beloved companion, these images show the important role Dublin horses played in daily life throughout the last century, from those pulling the Lord Mayor’s Coach to those feeding from an old car in Labre Park.

Crying cockles and mussels! Alive Alive O! Cabbages on Moore Street, lilies on Grafton Street, Christmas decorations on Thomas Street. The photographs here tell the story of the changes to the markets during the late 20th and early 21st century - the demise of the Iveagh clothes market, the re-invention of the Smithfield Horse Fair and the huge changes undergone by the street traders in Moore Street during the redevelopment of the area from the 1970s onwards.

Crime is serious business in Dublin and we love to read about it. From novels about detectives to accounts of serial killers, from gangster biographies to analysis of social issues, we have an appetite for all of it. The series hosted by the Central Library 'Crime in the City: Crime and History', looks at the broad issue of crime in Dublin through the ages.

Listen to Michael Russell's reading and talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Michael Russell reads from his two novels, 'The City of Shadows' and 'The City of Strangers'. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 17 October 2013 as part of its 'Crime in the City: Crime and History' series.Thank-you very much. You’ll excuse me if I’m a little breathless starting. Just to prove that I’ve come up from West Wicklow where parts of my novels are written, I was held up just outside Stratford, a tractor and trailer had shed about fifty bales of straw and the Guards wouldn’t let us through until the road was completely clear. I did my best but they were unimpressed when I said that I had to get to Dublin Central Library to talk to people about crime. I’ve written two novels which I guess loosely you would call, for want of a better phrase, historical crime fiction. One was The City of Shadows, which was published last year and The City of Strangers which is about to be published. It has actually already been published on the dreaded e-book but doesn’t come out as a real book until the beginning of November.Now these are both books which in the tradition of crime fiction feature a central character who is a detective as it happens he is not a private investigator, he’s a Garda detective. And they are the first two books of a number that will follow this character through the years from the early 1930s  through into the Second World War/ ‘Emergency’ whichever you prefer to call it.  It’s worth saying that somewhere in the DNA of crime fiction is the fact that it is popular literature. Whatever else it’s about, if it doesn't tell a story that people want to read, it’s somehow something else. So in a way, the first thing to say is these are stories, hopefully they are good stories, hopefully they are stories that will keep people's attention and make people want to turn the page. They may be about other things. Hopefully the history that’s in them is reasonably accurate and when there is supposition it’s based on hopefully a reasonably intelligent knowledge of the period.A critic this week, on my new book, was kind enough to say that at its heart this is a novel about memory and history and how this binds people together and what it meant to be Irish as the fledgling state established what it wanted to be. Now I hope there is a bit of that in there but I think primarily it’s about storytelling. Now I’ll talk a bit about how I started to write these books. Now I’m not very good at talking off the cuff, so I’ve just written a few things down so excuse me if I read. When I’ve done this - it’s only a page – I’ll read a bit from the books.Raymond Chandler said that one of the characteristics of crime fiction, for want of a better name, is the unnatural squeezing up of time frames. The same thing applies to history when it's dragged willingly or otherwise, into the world of crime writing. But why squeeze all that up at all? The answer to why anyone of us write anything, is always that we write what we love writing. We take what interests us and intrigues us and we try to turn that into a story. That doesn't mean there isn't usually bit more to it as well. We probably spend too much time putting fiction into genres and sub-genres these days. The historical crime novel is clearly a genre of some kind, combining as it does two resiliently popular areas of fiction, history and mystery. But it was an odd quality that a contemporary setting doesn’t demand. You can’t play fast and loose with the past the way you can with the present. Readers expect their history to be historical, especially if your detective is going to stumble into real events and real people along the way.When I started the first of this series of crime novels set in Ireland in the ‘30s and ‘40s, The City of Shadows, part of the pleasure and part of the purpose was to explore that time and in particular the way the Second World War touched Ireland.  And over the series to visit several cities sometimes at the heart of that war, sometimes at its compromised periphery: Dublin, Danzig, New York, Lisbon, Berlin, London, Rome. The starting point would always be the perspective of one small island that was to remain resolutely but uncomfortably neutral through the whole course of the conflict, even though tens of thousands of Irish men and women too would leave to fight for the allies, and when a major opposition to De Valera’s government in the form of the IRA wanted nothing more than a German invasion to shake off the last vestiges of British rule on the island. It would be about a time when British and German spies sat at adjacent tables in Dublin pubs and where Irish neutrality was best summed up not by the political rhetoric, but by the fact that German aircrew landing in Ireland were interned for the duration of the war. While allied airmen were put on a bus straight to Belfast.None of us know quite know where what we write comes from. It was really only when I started to write, that I realised the part played by the childhood tales my grandmother had told me about the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed in the ‘20s, and my mother and father’s stories of growing up in Second World War Britain.  As I wrote I felt I knew those dark streets better than I thought. History is only a piece of it and if our stories don’t work as crime fiction it doesn't matter how good the history is. It’s the stories that have to drive the history. The stories that have to open up the life of the main characters, in my case Stefan Gillespie, an outsider never happy with simple answers who is often uneasy with what his country is doing and with what it sometimes asks him to turn a blind eye to.The stories start with simple crimes, dead bodies and missing people. They lead Gillespie into dark places in the way that crime stories usually do. But those crimes frequently take him to the uncomfortable margins of the coming war and later to the war itself. It is in those deep shadows as I wrote that I found real events and real characters pushing their way into the story.It began with a man called Adolf Mahr, an archaeologist who was the much respected director of Ireland’s National Museum. He also happened to be the leader of the Nazi Party in Ireland and bluntly a German spy. Across Europe an Irishman called Seán Lester, a great man who has been erased from even schoolbooks my children read for Leaving Cert when studying this period. He happened to be the League of Nations High Commissioner in the city state of Danzig, which we know now as the Polish city of Gdansk, a German enclaves surrounded by Poland, which had recently elected a Nazi government and was busy dismantling its democratic constitution. For two years with little more than a stubborn nature and Irish charm, Lester and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Danzig, a Russian émigré who went by the unlikely Russian name of Edward O’Rourke stood in the way Danzig’s attempts to unite itself with Hitler’s Germany. Lester was called the most hated men in Germany. Danzig eventually joined Germany in 1939 of course, and the rest as we might say is history because Danzig was where the first shots of the Second World War were fired.  In The City of Shadows two bodies in the Dublin Mountains lead Stefan Gillespie to Danzig in search of a murderer. Four years later, in The City of Strangers he has to bring a killer back from New York. A death after the city’s Patrick Day celebrations pulls him into a world of espionage and counter-espionage again, this time via Republican politics. Again real characters are there to stumble on. The IRA chief of Staff Seán Russell in New York to raise money for the extensive but unsuccessful, sabotage against Britain; A Jewish gangster called "Longie" Zwillman who had unexpected FBI friends; Charles Coughlin, the radio priest who was one of America's most pro-Hitler voices and a visit by the English King to New York's World’s Fair.There is a struggle to remain neutral in the face of war that is in the background to both The City of Shadows and The City of Strangers.  A struggle in which both Ireland and America were involved. Sometimes it looks more like fight over which side you are going to be neutral on. It's an unfamiliar backwater of history, and maybe that's what combining history and mystery gives - the opportunity to go to some of the forgotten places history doesn't take us. But then perhaps that’s what all crime writing is doing all the time, using strong, compelling narratives to take us to places we would otherwise never get to.Now having said that the story is all important, the story is clearly the thing you can't really represent in a reading. And I thought the best thing to do is to read a few extracts that in a sense are about description, about the atmosphere of the time, partly in some cases about Dublin, the city.But I’ll start with an extract from The Irish Times. Each book is divided into three parts and it happened, I mean it came about by chance but each part is introduced by a real extract from an Irish Times article of the period. Sometimes those are very specific things which I’ve actually used in order to actually develop a crime. Sometimes they are pieces that give the atmosphere of the time. There is an extraordinary one which I probably won’t have time to read in the last part of the second book. A great thing to do an Irish Times reporter on the day war was declared by Britain and Germany - or Britain and France I guess, strictly speaking -  just went out into the streets of Dublin to see what was happening and just wrote about the conversations he overheard, almost none of which were about war. Actually it's a fantastic piece of writing and one of those things that I wish I'd written and wished I could've just sneaked straight into my book, but I do credit the guy with writing it.But anyway, when I was writing the first book I wanted something to happen, that involved, it was quite specific, I wanted my main detective character to be involved on a raid on an abortion clinic, but I didn’t want it to be just any abortion clinic. It wasn’t a backstreet abortion story. It had to be about an abortion clinic run by a man with friends and influence. It was operating as it were in plain sight. But it was more complicated than that. I wanted him to be German. I wanted him to be a friend of Adolf Mahr and I wanted him to be at some level involved in some quite complex areas of spying and blackmail, which meant that he was not only getting information, but that he was also selling information for instance to special branch at Dublin Castle. And I thought it was unlikely that I'd find anything like that but I’ll look in The Irish Times Archive, see if there is anything that just gives me a kind of leader into… Anyway I found this article about a police raid by a detective Garda Sergeant - it’s from the court report - on a house in Merrion Square where a man was running a clinic and he was German and he was very good friends of a lot of influential people. And it read:In the back drawing-room there was a quantity of medical and electrical apparatus. From the ceiling, operated by pulleys, was a large 170 centimetre shadow-less operating lamp hanging over a canvas covered object -when the cover was removed it was found to be a gynaecological chair with foot rests. The detective sergeant found a specially padded belt that could be used in conjunction with the chair. Among the objects found in the drawing-room was a sterilising case, in the drawer of which was wads of cotton wool. In the office there was a cardboard box containing a dozen contraceptives and a revolver.The Irish TimesThat last sentence is an extraordinary statement about the evidence of the time. Which was the most dangerous? Hard to know - the contraceptives or the revolver.The first book starts actually two years earlier than that raid and it’s the night before the Eucharistic mass in the Phoenix Park.The moon shone on the Liffey as it moved quietly through Dublin, towards the sea. The river was sparkling. Silver and gold flecks of light shimmered and played between the canal-like embankments of stone and concrete that squeezed it tightly into the city’s streets. By day the river was grey and sluggish, even in sunlight, darker than its sheer walls, dingier and duller than the noisy confusion of buildings that lined the Quays on either side. Its wilder origins, in the emptiness of the Wicklow Mountains, seemed long forgotten as it slid, strait-jacketed and servile, through the city it had given birth to. It wasn’t the kind of river anyone stood and looked at for long. It had neither majesty nor magic. Its spirit had been tamed, even if its city never had been. From Arran Quay to Bachelor’s Walk on one side, from Usher’s Quay to Aston Quay on the other, you walked above the river that oozed below like a great, grey drain. And if you did look at it, crossing from the Southside to the Northside, over Gratton Bridge, the Halfpenny Bridge, O'Connell Bridge, it wasn’t the Liffey itself that held your gaze, but the soft light on the horizon where it escaped its walls and found its way into the sea at last. Yet, sometimes, when the moon was low and heavy over the city, the Liffey seemed to remember the light of the moon and the stars in the mountains, and the nights when its cascading streams were the only sound.It was three o'clock in the morning as Vincent Walsh walked west along Ormond Quay. There was still no hint of dawn in the night sky. He had no reason at all to imagine that this would be the last day of his short life of only twenty-three years. He caught the glittering moonlight on the water. He saw the Liffey every day and never noticed it, but tonight it was full of light and full of life. More than a good omen, it felt like a blessing, cutting through the darkness that weighed him down. It was a fine night and surely a fine day to come. Turning a corner he saw lights everywhere now, lighting up the fronts of building, strung between the lampposts along the Quays, illuminating every shop and every bar. Curtains were drawn back to show lamps and candles in the windows of every home. The night was filling up with people. The streets had been empty, even fifteen minutes ago, when he’d set off from Red Cow Lane, but suddenly there were figures in the darkness, more and more of them now, in front, behind, crossing over the bridges from south of the river, all walking in the same direction: west.A stream of Dubliners moved along with him, flowing in the opposite direction to the Liffey, growing at every tributary junction that fed into the Quays. Men and women on their own, quiet and purposeful; couples, old and young, silent and garrulous, some holding hands like lovers and some oblivious of one another; families pushing prams and pulling stubborn toddlers, while youngsters of every age raced in and out of the throng with growing excitement. There were young men who walked in quiet, sober groups, some fingering a rosary, and others full of raucous good humour; women and girls, arm in arm in lines across the street, gossiping and giggling as eager, teasing, endless words tumbled out of their mouths. Occasionally the whole population of a side street decorated with flowers and banners erupted out to join the flow of people moving towards the Phoenix Park. Vincent Walsh glanced back to see the first pink glow behind him in the sky. The new day was coming. And it was as if everyone around him had that same thought at once, as if all those footsteps, already full of such happy anticipation, were moving even faster now, more purposefully and more exuberantly forward, to the gates that led into the Park.The noise was suddenly much louder. Everyone was talking. The sense of being a part of it all, of belonging to it all, of being absorbed into this hopeful stream of humanity, was irresistible. It wasn't something Vincent wanted to resist. He was fighting back tears, even as his face beamed and smiled in response to the joyful faces around him. This was how he wanted to feel; it was how, when this day ended, he knew he could never be allowed to feel. As they all poured through the Park gates together to find their places for the next day’s mass it was quiet again for a moment. Abruptly the night had opened up around them.  Dublin, always so closed and crowding in on itself, was gone. There was only the rhythmic sound of thousands of feet on grass and gravel, and the sight of thousands of shadows amongst the trees of the Phoenix Park.The City of Shadows, pp 3-5This is actually from close to the end of the second book and I guess it’s a demonstration of awe; it’s an example of real history, some real history, being incorporated in something. The background to this is the murder of an Irish intelligence officer who is working in New York at the Irish pavilion for the World’s Fair, which was on in New York in 1939 and where the Free State had spent an enormous amount of money on a pavilion, which was meant to do many things. It wasn’t only there to show Ireland's independence from Britain because it was very separate. In fact the World’s Fair of 1939 was the last World Fair at which there actually was and entity, an area that was called the British Empire and the Irish pavilion was a long way from that. One of the other things it was meant to do and that was very important to De Valera, it was meant to show to the world that the future somehow lay not with empires, not with big states, it lay with the free small countries of the world. And in that sense it was meant to kind of give a lead to what people saw was going to happen in terms of the breakup in particular, of the British Empire, but of other empires too. In the light of what was about to happen, of course, it has its own irony. Within six months of the opening of the World’s Fair at least two of the pavilions there, the Czechoslovak Pavilion and the Polish Pavilion were actually represented countries that no longer existed. But anyway, this is about a murder. It is about Stefan Gillespie, the detective, finding out why this murder happened. It seems quite simple. It has something to do with the aftermath of the Civil War and events that happened in West Cork in the early 1920s. In the end it turns out to be something which is rather more complex and is as much about betrayal within a family as it is about what was actually going on in the Civil War. This is the end of that story. It’s a story that’s kind of woven through and comes to the fore now and again. It’s a separate section; it’s what happens to one of the main characters involved in that story. You will recognise that there are certain historical events that are woven into that.The night before Aidan McCarthy's execution, Thomas Pierrepoint, the English hangman watched him through a secret window in the condemned cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, in order to finalise his calculations. Although the Home Office provided a table that matched height and weight to the length of the noose required for an efficient hanging, the final judgment was the hangman’s own; hanging was an intimate business and in the last seconds, when the hood was put over the head, there were only two people involved, the hangman and the to-be-hanged. Other judgments had, of course, already been made, and if there was another to come after the drop, well, that was in a different jurisdiction altogether.As Pierrepoint watched him, McCarthy was kneeling at the side of the bed praying.He prayed for the people he loved. For his wife and the man he had always looked on as his son. He prayed for the brother his silence had sentenced to death in another execution all those years ago on a stormy night outside Castleberehaven. He prayed for his country and the struggle for freedom that he was dying for. He thought of the places he loved. He remembered the sound of the sea; the breath of the cattle in the cold morning air; the rain on the Caha Mountains. He prayed for the places he loved too. He did pray for the man who had met a brutal death in a strange city because of the lies he had told, and because of the lies other people had made out of those lies, and because of what had been left inside a small boy’s heart seventeen years earlier; but it would be an exaggeration to say that the life of the soldier of the Free State, even then, warranted very much praying.He didn't pray for the five people who had died outside of the jewellery shop in Coventry’s Broadgate: a man of eighty-one, a man of fifty, a man of thirty-three, a woman of twenty-one, a boy of fifteen. He had heard their names many times in the course of the trial, but he didn't think of them now. He felt no real remorse for what he had done. A war was being fought, and wars had victims; there had been enough Irish victims after all. How many of their names were on English lips?He got up from his prayers and moved to the table where a plate of steak and roast potatoes and cabbage was waiting for him. There was a glass of Guinness. He had no particular love of stout; he was no great drinker; but he drank it out of politeness to the warder. And he was calm enough. What was happening now was what had to happen. He had known that from the moment he was arrested. And he had thought about it before in the bare, damp room in Hammersmith, lying awake at night, listening to the rumble of the Underground. He would die for Ireland and in doing that maybe someone else, someone younger wouldn’t have to die. In dying he would pay his debt too, and in paying it, finally the past would be purged.Aidan McCarthy had left Ireland for England the day Stefan Gillespie and Gearóid De Paor returned to Dublin. He had not waited for goodbyes; he would not see the faces of the people he loved changed in the way they saw him forever. He had simply walked away with enough money to take the boat from Cove to England.In London he had gone to Hammersmith, for no special reason other than that there were Irish people there, but not too many. He called himself David Haigh. He had got himself a job on a building site and, after sleeping rough for two nights, a room in Cambridge Grove, overlooking the District Line; he worked hard and kept himself to himself.The first night in Cambridge Grove he had walked down to the Thames; he had a drink at the Blue Anchor and drank it outside, looking at Hammersmith Bridge.The IRA’s attempt to blow it up was in Aidan McCarthy’s mind that night. It wasn't difficult, over a period of months, for him to find his way to people who knew people in the IRA in London, and to make it clear that he was willing to work for the cause. He had soon sensed who he should talk to and the habit of silence that characterised him recommended him to him. Since the bombing campaign had started in January the bombs had continued to go off, regularly and ineffectually; the IRA was now an illegal organisation in Ireland as well as Britain; more and more IRA men had been imprisoned. Volunteers were thin on the ground now, and because of that David Haigh was trusted sooner than he might have been. He moved very quickly from carrying messages across London to carrying explosives.On 21 August he had taken a train to Coventry to visit James Richards, an IRA man lodging with a family in Clara Street to instruct him to prepare a bomb. The bomb would be collected by another IRA man and planted in the city. McCarthy had returned to Hammersmith the next day to supply explosives for three bombs destined for Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey and the Bank of England. The bombers were caught before the bombs could be planted but two days later in Coventry, James Richards’ bomb went off outside a jewellery shop. The man who left the bomb was never identified, but James Richards was arrested immediately and Aidan McCarthy, as David Haigh, was already in custody. Now he was to hang.A man can only give what he has, but as he faced death, Aidan McCarthy found more than he knew he had. He had said little during the trial; he had answered questions where there was an answer he chose to give, but he said nothing, nothing that incriminated anyone. Only at the end of the day did he say anything about himself.‘My lord, before you pass sentence of death on me, I wish to thank sincerely the gentlemen who have defended me. I wish to state that what I have done I have done for a just cause. As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army I am not afraid to die.’ He died under the name he had called himself in London. He made no attempt to communicate with his family in Béarra. There was no consolation to be offered to them and he didn't expect his death to give any; but he felt he had done his duty at the highest level, and in doing so, he had tried to pay the debt he owed his brother. If there was forgiveness, please God, he had earned it. He died well for what he believed in; the five people in Coventry who had died also for what he believed didn’t; but as tens of millions prepared to die all over the world, well and not so well, for what others believed, none of it mattered very much.Many years later, Aidan McCarthy’s body would be transferred from the grounds of Winson Green to Ireland for burial. His coffin would be draped in the Irish tricolour, just as Captain John Cavendish’s had been, and just as alongside the Stars and Stripes Captain Aaron Phelan’s of the NYPD had been.Yet as Aidan McCarthy walked the cold stone corridor of Winson Green to meet Thomas Pierrepoint, his final thoughts were not as easy as he has hoped they might be. The priest walked beside him; his last confession was said; he had received his last Eucharist and he had carried its promise of salvation. And he wanted to believe it, yet the words that came to him, not the priest’s words but words suddenly there in his head, were not words of absolution. ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones … it were better for him a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the bottom of the sea.’As the black hood went over his head, the sound he heard was a sound from that morning, seventeen years ago on Pallas Strand, somehow there with him now, at the end; it was the angry screaming of the gulls. And it wasn't the eyeless face of his dead brother he saw, buried in sand almost up to the shoulders; it was the face of the small boy staring at it.The City of Strangers pp 456-460I’ll read one more bit, which kind of follows on from that. It’s about Stefan Gillespie, the detective, the hero if you like. The events of the book have been responsible for… in ways which are not direct for breaking up a relationship.  He is a fairly young man but he’s a widower and these are just some thoughts he has which I guess are relevant to what we are talking about.  This is a conversation that Stefan is having with a woman that he has been having an affair with, who is an English woman married to an Irishman who is in the British Army - which was the complexity of those days. And the odd thing is that although she is an English woman, and her husband, because he is a soldier has lived away a lot and oddly it's her husband who’s confused about his relationship with Ireland, whereas she actually has come to see it as her home and is now having to leave.‘Christmas in Sussex shouldn't be so bad. Isn’t it home?’ said Stefan.‘I'm not sure it is,’ she said quietly.He looked at her. He could see tears welling in her eyes.‘It’s not just Jane and Alex [they are her children who are friends of Stefan’s son and they are kind of eight and nine] I’m probably not doing a good job of enthusing them about going to England. I keep saying it’s going home, but it’s not their home. This is. And I suppose – I’ve never thought about it - I’d never realised. You know I spend all my time complaining about Whitehall Grove - it’s falling round our ears - and the farm’s a disaster - and all going to hell in a handcart while Simon swans around the Empire and leaves us all to rot here – well, you’ve been on the receiving end of enough of it.’‘That doesn’t sound like you at all.’She smiled, but the smile was only on her lips.‘The truth is - it’s my home too. I don’t want to go. It’s nothing to do with the war. It’s nothing to do with Simon. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I want us to be a family again. I want children to know their father, for all of us. But I wish it was here. I wish it was all the other way around.’‘Whatever happens, it won’t go on forever.’‘Is that the best you can do, Stefan?’ Now she laughed.  Okay it wasn’t very good even for a platitude.‘But you’ll have the children.’She nodded; that was better; at least that was true.For a moment they both looked at the fire.It was still, when everything else was over between them, the children that held them together.‘Can I sound like your mother, Stefan?’‘How the hell do I answer that?’‘I’ve never been very good at making wishes for other people. I wish you - I wish you and Tom - I suppose what I mean is I hope anything that happened between you and me - didn't get in the way of anything else -’He sat back and shook his head.‘Unfortunately there was nothing for it to get in the way of.’Then he laughed. It was a throwaway from the list of throwaways he had in stock for the occasions when people said such things. Valerie never had in the past; he liked her because she didn't push those lazy ideas at him. It didn't much matter that she had now. But he was conscious of the trip he had taken to Dún Laoghaire the week before. There had been a few days, just a few days out of years, when he had thought differently.  It hadn’t lasted very long. And even that tiny, fragile hope, maybe only barely there, had been broken, not by anything in him, not by anything in Kate O’Donnell, but by other people’s battles, other people's memories, other people's rattle bags of righteousness and revenge, other people’s wars. The past didn’t only come up out of the ground at you in Ireland; it walked around the streets, following you, and if you turned around to complain it spat in your face.The City of Strangers, pp 423-425 Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Donal Fallon's talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Donal Fallon seeks to separate fact from folklore regarding the notorious 'Animal gangs' of the 1930s and 1940s in Dublin. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 10 October, 2013, as part of its 'Crime in the City: Crime and History' series.Firstly thank-you to everyone for coming along today. My name is Donal Fallon and I’ve always had a particular interest in Dublin gang violence and in particular the most infamous of Dublin gangs who were without doubt the ‘Animal Gangs’. Now when people think of the ‘Animal Gangs’ they think of the 1940s and onwards, they think of razor blades in potatoes, they think of Garda Lugs Branigan, they think of the battle of Baldoyle and characters like the infamous Hencho of the 1960s. And I should say gang violence in Dublin is nothing new. You know at the minute everyone's talking about Nidge and the lads on Love/Hate on television. But you can find gang violence in Dublin going right back as far as you're willing to go. In the eighteenth century you had Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys. But I don’t think there’s been a single gang in the history of Dublin that have left the same lasting impact on the folklore of the city as the Animal Gang. Now what particularly interests me about the Animal Gang is their origins. Who are the first Animal Gang?  Where did they come from? And what I found during my research is that they emerged actually in the 1930s, not the later 1940s. That the Animal Gangs were actually there long before Lugs Branigan had ever even joined the Guards.  This gang are also often blamed for very many attacks on the Left and on the Republican movement in the 1930s. Not only have they entered the folklore of Dubliners and people in this city but they have also entered Republican folklore. Republicans of a certain age talk about being attacked by these gangs in the 1930s and 1940s.I chose this image very deliberately and this is a Jack B Yeats painting of a young newsboy because when you read about the Animal Gangs what you picture are grown man with razor blades in potatoes and swinging bicycle tyres.  What I found over the course of my research and what I’ll talk about today a little bit, is the fact the first Animal Gang seem to have actually been made up of young, juvenile newsboys. Going back to the Republican folklore, the first I ever heard of the Animal Gang, the first reference I ever heard was a song, and a song which was sung by the Dubliners, in which it said:On Banajos red ramparts the Spanish workers diedBut O’Duffy’s bellowing animal gang sang hymns of hate with prideSo the idea that the gangs were part of some fascist movement or anti-republican movement was always something I thought. Now as I say the story of these gangs begins not with men but rather children. Newspaper boys to be precise and a newspaper strike in 1934. It’s important today before we talk about the very newspaper boys that produced the Animal Gang to talk a little bit about newspaper boys in general. Where did newsboys even come from in Dublin? References to young newsboys in the city can be found as early as the 1880s in the newspapers. And the first illustration I have managed to find of a young newsboy in Dublin is this one here. This image appeared in The Irish Times in 1882, and as far as I know is the earliest depiction of young newspaper boys in Dublin. Alongside this illustration was a letter written by Pro Bono Public who said, there are many trials and hardships faced by the majority of newsboys in Dublin, asking is not possible for us to establish a charity, a benevolent undertaking from the citizens of Dublin, to look out for these newsboys and provide for them. Newsboys appear from that time onwards in newspaper reports and they are always described in a couple of ways, they are typically ragged and barefoot; they are typically talked about as being starving and children of the slums. The Irish Times when they produced this illustration they warned readers underneath these children can perish of cold or some worse fate on the streets of Dublin. Newsboys were long in the city before the Animal Gang or before the 1930s. And Pádraig Yeates that historian of the Lock Out has written about how young newsboys in Dublin had a real tendency towards militancy in the early twentieth century. In 1911, Big Jim Larkin, the Liverpool firebrand socialist set about trying to establish young Dublin newsboys into a trade union. Incredibly he managed to do this and as Pádraig Yeates has written by organising young newsboys, Larkin also ensured that his own newspaper had a very good, effective distribution network on the streets. He built up a very good working relationship with some of Dublin’s youngest and poorest workers. The young newsboys were so influenced by Jim Larkin that in 1911 they showed their own militancy when the children went on strike in opposition to this man William Martin Murphy. Young Dublin newsboys took strike action in 1911. They were selling the Evening Herald newspaper and unhappy with the terms on which the paper was provided to them and encouraged no doubt by Jim Larkin they took militant action. During this dispute there were wild scenes and one occasion a gang of newsboys numbering two hundred attacked an Evening Herald van and threw bundles of the papers into the River Liffey. Ernie O’Malley in his brilliant diaries, his brilliant memoirs writes about seeing young newsboys in the streets attacking policemen and staff of the Evening Herald. He describes them as quick-witted urchins who lured the attackers into narrow by lanes. There the boys used stones and pieces of brick with accuracy against the police.The links between the young Dublin newsboys and the union movement remained very strong, right through 1913 and continued into future decades. There are also many attempts to provide for these young newsboys, charity attempts. Ironically, the most successful of which was spearheaded by the son of William Martin Murphy, Doctor William Lombard Murphy, perhaps with a guilty conscience of the actions of his father. By 1928 the Belvedere Newsboys Club, a group, which have been established by William Lombard Murphy and many others, was operating from a very impressive premises on Pearse Street. And that was a charity which aimed to provide meals, and provide clothes and look out for these young newsboys in the streets of Dublin. William Lombard Murphy said at the opening of the Club brilliantly that, quote:‘Everyone who knows the Dublin newsboy knows what good qualities are to be found in him. He might not possess the greater civil virtues such as thrift, order or regularity but he has immense loyalty to his parents and an innate and essential decency of mind.’This club continued to grow right through the 1920s and 1930s. By 1931 the Belvedere Newsboys Club was looking out for one hundred and fifty young Dublin newsboys providing them with meals. Not alone did the institution provide food and shelter for youngsters it also argued for them and on their behalf. At their Annual General Meeting in 1931 the Newsboys Club put forward a proposal that a special court should be established in Dublin for children under fourteen far removed from the ordinary courts and presided over perhaps by a lady.By the 1930s young Dublin newsboys found themselves once again flirting with politics on the Left and on the Right. In 1934 a newspaper dispute in Dublin would change everything on this front and bring the newsboys into conflict with Irish Republicans and ultimately lead to the establishment of the first Animal Gang. Dublin in the summer of 1934 saw a phenomenal newspaper strike, which shut down print media in the city. It began in the Irish Independent but it spread to The Irish Press and The Irish Times when the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, which been established by Jim Larkin so many years previously, began to remove their members from the offices of these newspapers. The strike would last for months with workers inside print media demanding an increase in pay and better conditions. An Phoblacht the radical newspaper of the Republican movement gave vocal and consistent support to the striking workers. And as Brian Hanley has noted the print unions strike committee allowed only two papers to be printed during that strike. One was An Phoblacht and the other was another Republican newspaper called The Republican Congress. The striking workers believed that both of these newspapers were on their side, and while they were definitely not going to allow anyone print The Irish Times, you were allowed print Republican newspapers. An Phoblacht said that this newspaper strike is more than a dispute between newspaper owners and newspaper employees this is a challenge to the workers and must be taken up by every citizen who has the interest of a free Ireland and a free people at heart. Now that message may have been appreciated by striking workers inside the offices of the Irish Independent and The Irish Press but it wasn't appreciated by one group of workers, and that was newsboys. The newsboys depended on these newspapers to make a living and the scarcity of the newspapers has a very direct impact on their living conditions. For workers in the Irish Press in the Irish Independent may have been getting strike pay while they were out on strike, there was no strike pay for youngsters on the streets who needed these papers in their hands. In 1934, the issue of the young newsboys was raised inside of the Dáil and it was said that officially there were only thirty-four boys and thirteen girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen working on the street selling papers but the dogs on the street knew that that wasn’t true and there were many, many more than that perhaps as many as two hundred youngsters on the streets who needed these newspapers.So as you can imagine, when there’s only two papers in Dublin even if they are An Phoblacht and Republican Congress, they are in hot demand. Suddenly these papers which had been fringe papers on the Left become quite popular. The wholesale rate on the two papers was higher than newsboys were used to paying to The Irish Times or the Irish Independent, and so they make the decision to confront the editors of both newspapers, An Phoblacht and Republican Congress. There’s a brilliant file in the National Archives and it’s titled ‘Disturbances Created by Newsboys at Frederick’s Lane, Dublin City’. The file from the 14th September 1934 reports that on the 12th September Gardaí were alerted to the fact there was a row between newspaper boys and Republicans in Frederick Lane and that some windows were broken. Gardaí noted that when they got the scene they found fifty newsboys quickly moving away from the scene having refused to pay an extra three pence per dozen on copies of An Phoblacht. Later at about 8.50pm Gardaí noted that fifty men were seen marching four deep towards Parnell Square and taking up positions around the offices of An Phoblacht. It was obvious that the IRA had come to defend the offices of An Phoblacht after they had earlier been attacked by these young newspaper boys. The Republican movement took it upon themselves rather than going to the Gardaí to protect the premises from future attack. Not only did the young newspaper boys go to the offices of An Phoblacht and break several windows and attack IRA men, they later went to the offices of the Republican Congress and in this next incident you find where the very name animal gang comes from.  Going to the offices of the Republican Congress, they bump into a man Frank Ryan, a rather famous figure in republican history and indeed in republican folklore. Frank Ryan, on the left here, was the man who led Irish republicans to fight in Spain against forces of General Franco. Now Ryan produces this paper, The Republican Congress, which has emerged from a left-wing split, very shortly previously within the IRA. Essentially, the left-wing of the IRA had left the movement and established this new movement The Republican Congress in an attempt to create a new broad republican socialist front in Ireland. Now the newsboys go the offices of the Republican Congress and make the same demands which were made of An Phoblacht and the IRA’s newspaper. Again they demand a cheaper wholesale rate from Frank Ryan and Frank Ryan totally and completely refuses. Gardaí then noted that the newspaper boys attacked Frank Ryan, and according to the intelligence report Frank Ryan shouted after them that they were little better than animals in their behaviour. By this remark he unconsciously christened the gang because they later adopted the title animal gang. So Frank Ryan by condemning them as animals inadvertently christens them; they quite like the title. That theory is very interesting because like most Dublin people interested in the history and folklore of Dublin I've always believed that there were two potential origins for the name. One was the viciousness of the gang probably labelled against them by ordinary Dubliners who would call them animals.  And the other theory could have been that these were…it was always said that these men were supposedly dockers, grown men who had worked on the docks of Dublin alongside real animals and livestock. But in the Garda files, you have this theory, this brilliant theory that Frank Ryan was the one who named the gangs.An Phoblacht and Republican Congress wasted no time in condemning the youths. On the 15th September 1934 the front of An Phoblacht said a gang known as the animals have smashed windows at their offices and had made several abortive attempts to enter the office. The IRA newspaper also claimed that some of the young newspaper boys were wearing Blueshirts. Now that claim is not in the Garda reports at all. This was a time when there was very intense anti-republican and anti-Communism in Dublin, and I think the IRA embarrassed by the fact that they had been attacked by young Dublin newsboys twist the story to look like the Blueshirts had attacked the office. The Garda report on the incident makes no reference to such shirts and it’s so detailed it's not the kind of thing they would have missed. The IRA also claimed the attack on their office was an outrage, an anti-strike move by agents of the employers and the Irish Independent. In a follow-up edition of the paper the IRA pledged itself to clean up city gangs.Now two Dublin newsboys came to the attention of the IRA, now when I say boys these were grown men who sold newspapers but worked around the boys known as Macaulay and Lawless from the north inner city and identified by IRA as ringleaders of the violence. The IRA go into the north inner city in search of these young newsboys and it quickly becomes apparent that the bulk them live around this premise. This was Corporation Buildings in the heart of the north inner city. Corporation housing which was built in the early twentieth century in 1904 in the very heart of what had been the Monto district, the red light district of Dublin. Now Corporation Buildings have brilliantly been described as a total failure of housing for the working-class in Dublin and that is a good description of what they were. They are shown here in 1932 at the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. The IRA know that the bulk of young boys who attacked their offices come from this housing scheme and houses around it. They also know that they hang out in a hall called the Ardee Hall which the IRA describe as the animal gang hideout. In late September 1934, several members of the IRA go to the Ardee Hall, or in the words of An Phoblacht take over the Ardee Hall and they warn the animal gang that more exciting run-ins could happen in the future if their activity continues.Now thankfully for the newspaper boys and the IRA, not long after this in late September 1934, the newspaper strike came to an end. A resolution was reached. The Times of London said the next day, that the losses that have been sustained by the city of Dublin are incalculable, but none have suffered as much as the youth of the city.  Gardaí believed if the newspaper strike was over, then the principal cause of conflict between the news vendors and An Phoblacht had been removed, and that the animal gang were likely to disappear. Gardaí also said that this young gang had no political motive and that the members were quote “hooligans”, pure and simple. But that was not to be the last anyone would hear of the animal gang. In fact, the term rapidly spread like wild fire. Being given huge, huge attention in the mainstream press, it actually seems that what would happen next is copycat gangs would begin to appear right across the city of Dublin. The Cork Examiner was one newspaper, which of course was totally unaffected by the printing strike in Dublin and like An Phoblacht and Republican Congress the Cork Examiner became quite popular in Dublin during the newspaper strike. Now they gave incredibly sensationalist coverage to the animal guy during the newspaper dispute. They wrote about how youngsters were inflicting ugly wounds with sharp instruments on one another and also wrote about clashes between two rival gangs at Railway Street in the heart of the inner-city. While the original animal gang had come from Corporation Buildings, it seems that quite soon afterwards copycat gangs begin to appear.  A tiger gang in Ringsend and yet another self-titled animal gang in Donnybrook appear only moments after the initial violence in the newspaper strike. No longer were these youngsters attacking the proprietors of newspapers, but it seems like much of the violence was now youth on youth and between rival gangs of youth.So where does all of this fit into anti-communism if youths are attacking youths how is that relevant to anti-communism, which was also in the title of this lecture? It is important to state that the 1930s was a time of very militant anti-communism in Ireland. We had seen a red scare almost unlike anything before it in 1932 at the time of that election. Cumann na nGaedheal famously whip up anti-Communist feelings and try and present Fianna Fáil as a Communist menace. In the 1932 election there is a brilliant Cumann na nGaedheal poster which shows an Irish Tricolour with a red flag superimposed and says, quite simply, ‘keep the red off our flag’. Now, in addition to Cumann na nGaedheal whipping up anti-communist hysteria with regards the republican movement in Ireland there is an international dimension to this.  In Spain a democratically elected government, a democrat socialist government in many ways, comes the power. And the over throw of the Spanish Monarchy and the rise of anti-clerical feeling in Spain is used by the Catholic Church and others in Ireland. The argument is made that if the Catholic Church should fall in Spain it will next fall in Dublin.There is also the very intense poverty of the inner city, and there’s a belief that that poverty is fertile ground for communism to spread. The Irish Times said in October 1931, that in a city where four thousand and eight-hundred tenements shield twenty-five thousand families it is almost a miracle communism has not flourished aggressively in this hideous city. March 1933, saw some of the worst anti-Communist violence in Irish history. Violence that RM Douglas, a historian of the period has described as the worst violence in Dublin since the Civil War. Much of the anti-communism in the early thirties was whipped up by various organizations. In particular, a group known as the St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League established in March 1933. The members of the St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League pledged themselves to keep the menace of communism off the streets of Ireland. And not long after the establishment of that group, in late March 1933, Connolly House on Great Strand Street in Dublin was attacked - headquarters of the Revolutionary Workers’ Group, the Communist Party of Ireland. Now this picture shows the inside of Connolly House after it had been attacked and two young Gardaí inside the attacked building. In March ’33, over three nights a crowd laid siege to this building, really whipped up by hysteria in the Pro-Cathedral. At a particularly vicious sermon, a Jesuit Preacher informed the congregation in the Pro-Cathedral, that here in the holy city of Dublin the vile creatures of communism are among us. Over three nights the crowd besieged this building while a small number of socialist activists inside including IRA men attempted to protect it. The blame for this attack in Irish left-wing folklore has always been laid on the animal gang. Charlie Gilmour who was then active with the IRA, recalled in a 1983 interview with The Irish Times being inside of this building when it was attacked. He said the backbone of the mob who attacked us that night were the animal gang. A vicious street gang drawn from the worst of the city’s slums.  In a 2003 obituary for Eugene Downing, another socialist who was inside of the building, The Irish Times said he took part in the defence of Connolly House when it was attacked by the notorious animal gang. But the length of time between this event and those claims should definitely be noted. There is no reference to an animal gang at the siege in the Garda reports at the time. The Guards compiled a very detailed account of just who attacked this building and what’s interesting about it, they say in their report there was a very large percentage of respectably dressed young women. They talk about the make-up of the crowd and it comes across as a very middle class mob.  I've always believed that republicans and socialists are unwilling to admit just how unpopular they were in the early 1930s and it’s much easier to blame this kind of violence on some animal gang than on those who actually carried it out.Now where things get confusing is in the fact some people who are active at this time, even then made claims of an animal gang attacking them, though a little later. No one made claims as strongly as Peadar O'Donnell, the brilliant novelists and republican activist right through the revolutionary period and into the 1930s. Peadar O'Donnell claims in a 1937 book, that the animal gang were made up of very fine fighting material from the slum basements and were the most effective terrorist gang of 1930s Dublin. He also said that the animal guys were mobilised in an inner city hall at one stage in the 1930s and told by a young woman that the fight in Spain is only a precursor to a war against religion in Ireland and the churches of Dublin would be the first to suffer. O'Donnell claimed that young Dublin youths were gathered into a religious hall and told the Pro-Cathedral would be turned into an anti-God Museum if Communism ever succeeded in Dublin.O'Donnell was not the only one to claim the Left at the time were attacked by the animal gang.  In his 2006 memoirs, Bob Doyle, the last surviving Irishman to fight in the Spanish Civil War before he died claimed that he remembered a gang he knew in the 1930s who were also attacking the Left.  He said they were made up of toughs. They used bicycle chains. He said they would fight Republicans with frequency on O'Connell Street. He also claimed, rather boldly, that the animal gang wore British Legion Poppies under their clothes. Now he believed they fought for the Blueshirts and he always thought a priest organized them. He went on to claim they attacked anyone on the Left: meetings, marches, demonstrations. Now those claims in 2006 they were made long after the events are I’ve never found a reference to an animal gang or inner city youths wearing poppies while attacking Republicans in Dublin.There’s a couple of instances of anti-communist violence in the 1930s that are worth talking about. But firstly to give an extent of how widespread anti-communism was, this is a great story, because this is the band of the Pro-Cathedral, the St. Mary's Pipe Band who in the 1930 in the anti-communist hysteria of the moment are renamed the St. Mary's Anti-Communist Pipe Band, the official band of the Pro-Cathedral. All of the men you're looking at here follow Eoin O’Duffy out to Spain. The Blueshirts in Spain claim that Irish soldiers were unable to march to Spanish music and O’Duffy recruits this band from the inner-city, from the Pro-Cathedral to go to Spain so that, you know, Irish soldiers can march to Spanish airs while in Spain. Brendan Behan famously proclaimed that the Blueshirts were the only army in history to come back with more men than they left with. They did actually come back with more men than they left with because the pipers went out after most of the Blueshirts had gone.On occasion in April 1936 there was a particularly nasty incident in Dublin of anti-communist mob violence that has always been blamed on the animal gang. It was an Easter Rising commemoration in April of that year. One historian has noted that the Communist Party and Republican Congress members were attacked by the animal gangs as they marched to Glasnevin Cemetery. Jack White, a man who had been a founding member of the Irish Citizen Army in 1913 but later became a militant anarchist in Spain was there in April 1936 he wrote years later, ‘I had to fight for three kilometres against the Catholic actionists who attacked us on the streets as we marched to honour the memory of the Republican dead who fell at Easter 1916. These were pious hooligans who came inside of the cemetery and tore up grave rails simply to attack us.’  Now this all happened out at Glasnevin Cemetery, and as I say in the folklore of the city, it has often been blamed on animal gangs. What encouraged the crowd to attack this Easter parade? I’ve always thought it was the presence of one man among them, a man called Willie Gallagher who was marching in the Easter parade was a Scottish MP, but more than being a Scottish MP he was a Scottish Communist MP, one of only four Communists ever elected into Westminster in London. There was a brilliant line at the time as Willie Gallagher was marching into Glasnevin Cemetery someone shouted in the mob, ‘Don’t allow that Scottish Communist bastard into a Catholic Cemetery.’ Now the funny thing about that Glasnevin Cemetery is, of course, a non-denominational cemetery where Catholics and Protestants are buried alongside one another, but that fact was lost on the mob.Not only did they attack an Easter parade in April 1936, two days later, at College Green there was another day out. A crowd of between four and five thousand people gathered at a republican meeting where Willie Gallagher the Communist MP was going to speak alongside Irishman Peadar O'Donnell. Now between four and five thousand people turned up for that meeting but Gardaí estimated that ‘about ninety-eight percent of the people at College Green were hostile to the aims of the meeting.’ That’s a pretty good turnout for the hostile crowd. This meeting was stopped from happening. Again, I’ve always believed from the Gardaí reports of who was there on the day, this was not actions of young inner-city newsboys, the initial animal gang. Once again, this was the actions of a rather respectable middle-class mob. Not only did they stop a meeting on College Green from happening, but they later attacked Trinity College Dublin and the Masonic Hall. Now when you look at those three targets Communists, Trinity and the Masonic Hall it indicates a single thing and that is a sense of militant Catholicism at the forefront. Trinity College would've been regarded by the crowd as a Protestant institution. Of course Catholics were forbidden from attending it without the permission of the bishop right until 1970. The Republican Congress organisation at the time blamed the animal gang and other such defenders of faith and morals for the attacks in April, 1936. But was animal gang just shorthand by that stage for violent mob? Did the term mean anything? Certainly those who carried out the violence were far removed from a newspaper strike a few years previously.Now when you're talking about the animal gangs to Dubliners today it's not communism in the 1930s they think of. It's the 1940s and infamous battles, like the Battles of Baldoyle and the Battle of Tolka Park. A certain folklore has emerged around the animal gangs of the 1940s but it’s very, very clear that they are quite far removed from the animal gangs of the 1930s.  I've always believed that the Spanish Civil War is a real turning point in Irish political history. You know the Left and the Right both go and fight in this war, seeing it as a continuation of their own struggles in Ireland. But in many cases they don’t return and the hostility and the militant violence between the Left and Right, in the thirties in Ireland, the street politics if you will, really seems to die out with the Civil War in Spain in the late 1930s. By the 1940s people talk about the animal gangs in a very, very different sense. Kevin Kearns in his oral history books of Dublin has done very, very good work on the animals in the 1940s. These seem to be totally different gangs who were in no way occupied with the Republican movement but rather gangs that were affiliated to bookies, affiliated to publicans and the like and who were involved in just simple criminality. A folklore has also emerged that the animal gangs were smashed in the 1940s by Garda James C Branigan or Lugs Branigan as he is known to generations of Dubliners. In his biography of Garda James C Branigan, Bernard Neary writes that the 1940s saw the Gardaí and indeed the state adopt a much tougher approach to Dublin gangs. I mentioned two instances there in my introduction to the ‘40s which are particularly interesting: a battle at Baldoyle and another battle at Tolka Park dragged the animal gangs back to the front pages of newspapers. In fact the battle at Baldoyle which was said to be orchestrated by two Dublin bookmakers in May of 1940 displaced the Second World War from the top of the national media in Ireland and whipped up hysteria in the capital that the animal gang were still alive and well.Now that battle is a story for another study and another day but while focusing on the ‘30s I always like to briefly mention the Battle of Tolka Park in 1942, because I think it’s one of the most obscure moments in history of youth gang violence in Dublin. In March 26th 1942 nine youths were charged in Dublin with attempted murder because of a battle, or a clash to give guidance on the pitch of Shelbourne Football Club in Tolka Park. ‘Dublin Football Venue Onslaught’ read the headlines of The Irish Times reporting on truly bizarre scenes. During a clash between Mountain View and St Steven’s United in the Junior Combination Cup, hardly a crowd-puller, blood had been spilled on the terraces of an Irish football stadium. The clash occurred between two rival gangs, the Stafford Street Gang on one hand and the Ashe Street Gang on the other. Now how did two Dublin gangs come to find themselves on the pitch of Tolka Park? Newspaper reports at the time said one gang had rather incredibly gained access to the Stadium by travelling down the river Tolka on makeshift boats. The Irish Press reported that this gang had climbed over the partition from the Riverside into the stadium. The other gang had entered into the ground as a result of the turnstile man leaving his ‘stile, permitting easy access into the ground. The Irish Times, said that none of these youths had paid into the stadium as if that fact was ever in doubt. It was ten minutes into the second half play before the gangs would clash. The Irish Press reported a spectator noting that it was like hell had been let loose and the paper noted that the violence occurred for the something like the region of fifteen minutes, leading to two hundred spectators fleeing from the ground in panic. Arthur Smith, the linesman on the day would note to the papers that he saw a man running with a sword and heard spectators in the crowd shout it's the Ashe Street Gang and the Stafford Street Animal Gang. He also remarked that one man bleeding from the head was carried away from the violence behind the Drumcondra goal and onto the field of play by players. The ref of the day would note that he immediately stopped the game upon seeing the panic in the stands and that the injured man carried onto the field of play was taken into dressing room. Thirty youths were involved in the disturbances. Nine were tried for murder and very, very heavy sentences were handed out against those youths.The idea that Lugs Branigan, shown here, had single-handedly stopped the animal gangs from running wild in Dublin is not something I believe to be true. I don't think you could beat gang violence off the streets by applying the tactics of gang violence and what actually brought about an end of the animal gang in my view, was the very heavy sentences that were handed out to youths in the courts. They were essentially treated as adults would be. Very, very lengthy sentences. Very few of them seem to have become active in gang violence after coming out of prison again. The youths, the nine of them that were charged with murder ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. In the June court settings, Lugs Branigan himself came forward and spoke in the courts about the scourge of the animal gangs in Dublin.There’s an entire different layer of folklore around the animal gangs in the 1940s. Dominic Behan, for example in his classic memoirs, Teems of Times and Happy Returns, tells a story about the Dublin animal gang who he says were mainly dockers boarding boats and going to Liverpool where they fought their equivalent for a day and took over the city of Liverpool. How much of that is actually true we’ll never know. And as is so often the case with this kind of Dublin history, the line between fact and folklore is often very, very blurred indeed. But I hope with my research at least what I’ve managed to do is show that in the 1930s it was not the animal gang who were attacking the Left at will but a much higher percentage of ordinary citizens motivated primarily I believe by religious hysteria. So thank you so much for listening. I hope you took something from that today.(applause) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. 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