The State of Dublin's History

The city of dublin celebrated its millennium in 1988. The birthday was not without controversy as the authenticity of the foundation date of 988 was highly suspect. But the decision by the corporation of the city to celebrate its long and contested history marked a political turning point, a move away from the cold war that had been waged for twenty years and more between City Hall and a variety of conservation lobbies. The epic struggle to save the vestiges of Viking Dublin from being covered by the new City Offices had left a difficult legacy, and the millennium was taken to signal official recognition of both the cultural and the commercial value of the city's deep history. A new sense of pride in the city's past became even more evident in the initiatives surrounding Dublin's choice as European City of Culture in 1991. During that year the Dublin Writers Museum was opened in Parnell Square, the first City Archaeologist was appointed, the old Royal Hospital in Kilmainham was transformed phoenix like to become the Irish Museum for Modern Art, and the state-owned Temple Bar Properties Company was established to oversee the rescue and transformation of a key segment of Dublin's waterside. The following year the Dublin Civic Trust was established and soon became a most effective architectural-heritage advocacy group. None of these initiatives was championed by the municipal authority, but things began to change under the regime of a new city manager, John Fitzgerald (1996–2006). The 1990s ended with a massive renovation of City Hall, revealing its spectacular neoclassical origins that nineteenth-century municipal modifications had substantially hidden.

Yet now, a decade later and after the crash of the Celtic Tiger, the city's official engagement with its past is still patchy and at times incoherent. What indeed constitutes Dublin history? The very identity of the urban region is occluded in the official mind, the idea of a past worth celebrating focused on the tiny medieval walled core, or at most on the Georgian city set within the canals. On the positive side, the last decade saw the transfer of the previously ill-resourced city archives to the new Dublin City Library in Pearse Street in 2001, where the special printed collections (the Gilbert Library) had long been housed. The venue has since become a successful center for public events relating to the city's history and heritage.¹ And in the basement of City Hall, where once the archives were stored, an elegant interpretative center telling "the story of the capital" has become a standard tourist site, complementing "Dublinia," the very well-established venue beside Christ Church Cathedral that provides a popular introduction to the sights and sounds of the medieval city. The National Museum's famous 1916 Room in Kildare Street was modernized and relocated to Collins Barracks in 2006 on the 90th anniversary of the Rising, and other thematic museums (more often heritage centers) exploring aspects of the city's history have opened (and in some cases closed again quite quickly).²

Yet the city qua city lacks a big public space to explore its past in a challenging and reflective manner. For nearly seventy years there was a modest civic museum (standing two blocks west of Grafton Street) associated with the Old Dublin Society, which in 2003 "died a quiet death after a long slide into apathy and neglect."³ Since then there have been intermittent plans for a new museum dedicated to the city's history, first in the Docklands development area (in 2005), a proposal that had the then Taoiseach's support. Subsequently, the notion was to locate the new museum on a site between Christ Church Cathedral and the new Civic Offices (in 2006). More recently, the favored site was the General Post Office (2008), but that idea is almost certainly dead as well.⁴ However, during the time that plans for a museum of Dublin were being canvassed, the city appointed its first Heritage Officer, drew up a heritage map of the city that sought to delineate its historic...