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Dublin City Library and Archive is pleased to present the annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture which will be held on 29th May 2024 with a talk by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer entitled, ‘The lived experiences of women in early modern Dublin’.

Dublin City Council’s Historian in Residence programme welcomes two new historians. Elizabeth Kehoe and Katie Blackwood will be working in the Dublin Central and Dublin North Central areas respectively. Mary Muldowney, Cormac Moore, and Catherine Scuffil return to the programme. Dervilia Roche continues as the Historian in Residence for Children.

James Connolly, socialist and signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, is to be commemorated by a Dublin City Council plaque.

The Radical Newspaper Archive is now available through our Irish Newspaper Archives Subscription

His videos have hundreds of thousands of views across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, though he had never heard of any of them. He has inspired a whole new generation of social historians that were born after he died.

The module looked at collections as creative resources, with a focus on digitised collections of the partner institutions

Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1863-1941) was one of Dublin’s finest portrait painters but she also immersed herself in the political and social fabric of Dublin life, becoming the first female elected as a Dublin City Councillor in 1912.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Monica Roberts was a young upper-class woman who lived at Kelston, Stillorgan, Co. Dublin. Together with her friends, she set up a 'Band of Helpers to the Soldiers' to provide gifts and comforts to men at the Western Front, who were members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers or the Royal Flying Corps. The group sent cigarettes and tobacco, socks and vaseline for tired feet, handkerchiefs, boot-laces, chocolate, peppermint, oxo and dried fruit. Monica Roberts included a letter with her gifts and the recipients replied to her, setting up a correspondence. The letters from the soldiers give a vivid picture of conditions at the Front, and also include comments on contemporary politics. Of particular interest are remarks from soldiers regarding the 1916 Rising. Included in the collection and available here online is Monica Roberts' contemporary diary from Easter Week 1916, which includes her eye-witness account of the Rising.The collection contains 453 letters from 56 soldiers, who are mainly from the lower ranks; there is only one letter from Monica Roberts. These letters were kept for many years by Monica's daughter Mary Shackleton, who gave them to Tom Burke M.B.E., Chairman of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association. Since 2005, the collection has been housed in Dublin City Library and Archive, as part of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association Archive. We would be particularly interested in hearing from descendants of those soldiers featured in the collection, or indeed from anyone holding letters from Monica Roberts to the soldiers. Please e-mail [email protected] online publication of the Monica Roberts Collection is a Dublin City Council project, under the direction of Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian, Brendan Teeling, Deputy City Librarian and Dr. Mary Clark, Dublin City Archivist. Project management is by Ellen Murphy, Senior Archivist, Dublin City Archives. Initial arrangement and cataloguing of the collection was by the late Andrew O'Brien, while scanning of the collection is by Christian Keegan, both of Dublin City Archives. Each letter was carefully transcribed by Finola Frawley of Dublin City Archives, who also translated letters written in French. A guide to the collection was prepared by Lisa Murphy, Dublin City Archives Intern (2012). Preparation of the collection for online publication is by genealogist John Grenham, who provided full text searching, and linked the original documents to the transcripts.Dublin City Council is publishing these letters online as part of its programme for the Decade of Commemorations, 1913-1923.Access A Guide to the Monica Roberts Collection (pdf, 1.77mb)Also Monica Roberts: List of Letters (pdf, 389kb)

We are pleased to announce that the City Surveyor’s Maps Collection 1695 – 1827 is now available to the public as part of our presence on the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).

On the 80th Anniversary, we remember The North Strand Bombing on the night of 30/31 May 1941, when four bombs were dropped over the North Strand area by German aircraft.