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We are delighted to share the ‘History on Your Doorstep’ series with you, written by Dublin City Historians in Residence.

Dublin City Council will unveil a commemorative plaque for the writer Maeve Brennan at her childhood home (48 Cherryfield Avenue) in Ranelagh on 6 January 2024 at 11am.

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.

New Dublin City Council publication Vindicating Dublin by Aodh Quinlivan tells the story behind the controversial dissolution of Dublin Corporation in 1924

William Butler Yeats, known to friends and family as Willie, was born in Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, on 13 June 1865. He was the eldest son of John Butler Yeats, portrait painter, and his wife Susan Pollexfen, whose family came from County Sligo. The family moved to London when Willie was a baby and remained there until 1880, but he spent his summers with his mother’s family in Sligo. When the family returned to Dublin he attended the High School in Harcourt Street. He originally studied art at the Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy School, but later decided to devote himself to literature, especially poetry and drama.Left below: William Butler Yeats (click all images to enlarge) . .  The Yeats family moved back to London in 1887, but by this time Willie had already decided that his writing should celebrate Ireland’s heroic past. In 1891 he founded the Irish Literary Society of London, and the following year in Dublin he was one of the founders of the National Literary Society. The Society’s aim was to encourage the study and appreciation of Ireland’s literature, folklore and legends. In 1899 he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, with Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn, this evolved into the Abbey Theatre in 1904.His first publication, Mosada: a dramatic poem, published in 1886, is held in the Colin Smythe Yeats Collection at Dublin City Library & Archive. This does not have an Irish theme, but a series of poems and plays over the next few years demonstrate his interest in the celebration of Ireland’s past. In 1889 he published The wanderings of Oisin, a long poem based on Irish mythology, in 1892 the poetic play The Countess Cathleen, and in 1893 his first volume of folk stories, The Celtic twilight. The range of his writings is wide, from poetry and plays to folk tales, prose works and three volumes of autobiography, but it is as a poet that his name is chiefly associated. . . Yeats was considered the greatest poet of his day and his worldwide reputation has endured. He was awarded honorary degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast in 1922, and he was appointed a senator in the new Irish Free State senate from 1922 to 1928. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Read and enjoy his work at Dublin City Library & Archive.

Dublin, Monday, 10 May 1915. Following the tragic loss of RMS Lusitania, on Friday afternoon 7 May, off the south coast of Ireland near the Old Head of Kinsale, in which 1,198 passengers and crew were drowned, it is reported that Sir Hugh Lane, benefactor to this city, is among the casualties.

In the early 1950s (1950-1955) the English poet Philip Larkin lived in Belfast, where he was working as Librarian in Queen’s University. While there he made a number of visits to Dublin.During this time he wrote many of the poems which made up his first major collection The Less Deceived (1955). The proposed collection was rejected by several English publishers, leading Larkin to submit it to the Dublin based Dolmen Press in 1954. But they also declined to publish it. Despite this rejection and a generally negative view of Dublin, expressed on a number of occasions to friends (“I prefer Belfast to Dublin - not architecturally of course, but architecture isn’t everything.” Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, P182), he retained enough memories of the place to evoke it in a later poem ‘Dublinesque’. The poem was written in the summer of 1970 and published in his final full-length collection High Windows (1974). It describes the funeral of a woman, possibly a prostitute - at least many of the mourners are characterised as “a troop of streetwalkers” - and captures the somewhat maudlin atmosphere of the occasion with its “air of great friendliness ... And of great sadness also.”In common with several later Larkin poems the dynamic of the poem moves from an exact description of a mundane, even banal scene, to another dimension where a sort of transcendence is achieved; in this case by the fading sound of a mourner’s voice “singing/Of Kitty, or Katy,/As if the name meant once/All love, all beauty.”

I was delighted to discover that this year's One City, One Book, If Ever You Go, A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song, includes one of my favourite poems, entitled Dublin by Louis MacNeice. This poem may seem like an odd choice, as MacNeice paints a picture of a city in decline, however, Dublin at this time, with 'her seedy elegance', (p. 8) holds a great fascination for me.Anyone with an interest in genealogy, who has used census returns or street directories such as Thoms, will immediately recognise MacNeice’s Dublin. His description of a Dublin tenement with its,…bare bones of a fanlight,over a hungry door. (p. 7)highlights the poverty and depravation of many city dwellers at this time.  MacNeice was not a native of Dublin (he was born in Belfast) but he shows a great fondness for the city, and like Patrick Kavanagh (Collected Poems p.150) he romanticises the Liffey when speaks about,…the brewery tugs and the swanOn the balustrade stream (p. 7)When MacNeice wrote this poem in the 1930s Nelson’s Pillar was a famous landmark, not only with Dubliners but also  with country people who used it as a meeting place. Many a first date started out there under the gaze of Admiral Nelson. At the time of writing, MacNeice could not have foreseen that O’Connell Street with,…Nelson on his pillarwatching his world collapse (p. 7)would change so dramatically.  An explosion in 1966, fifty years after the Easter Rising, (Irish Independent 08/03/1966) destroyed the Pillar and Nelson lost his head, however, visitors to the Reading Room of the Dublin City Library and Archive will find that Admiral Nelson is still keeping a watchful eye on proceedings and who knows maybe romance can still blossom under his gaze.

If ever you should go in search of a song or a poem it is incredible for such a small nation how rich and diverse and consistently good Irish output has been and thus, it is fitting that 2014’s Dublin: One City, One Book title is devoted to celebrating that rich heritage. Available in all Public Libraries and good book shops it is called If Ever You Go – A Map of Dublin in Poetry & Song after the poem by Patrick Kavanagh.From Dean Swift to W.B. Yeats to J.M. Synge and James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh to Brendan Kennelly, Dermot Bolger to Eavan Boland, the variety and sensitivity of the Irish poets’ voices have inspired many even beyond our shores. Anyone who has ever heard the late Seamus Heaney reading his poetry can only ever hear his voice reciting thereafter.This quotation from Padraic Colum’s ‘Dublin Roads' could have been written for Francis Ledwidge, a staunch nationalist and poet whose sensitivity remained even as he fought in World War I which eventually, tragically claimed his life at just 29 years old.Ledwidge’s father died when he was 5 years old and consequently a young Francis was forced to look for work at just 13:When you were a lad that lacked a trade,Oh, many’s the thing you’d see on the wayFrom Kill-o’-the-Grange to Ballybrack,And from Cabinteely down into Bray,When you walked these roads the whole of the day.'In France' by Francis Ledwidge:The silence of maternal hillsIs round me in my evening dreams;And round me music-making rillsAnd mingling waves of pastoral streams.Whatever way I turn I findThe path is old unto me still.The hills of home are in my mind,And there I wander as I will.

This weekend many people around the world will be wearing the Shamrock, a tiny plant symbolising the Irish nation. Taoiseach Enda Kenny will present a bowl of Shamrock to the President of the United States, Barack Obama, today.