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Dublin Festival of History Podcast

Podcasts from the Dublin Festival of History, brought to you by Dublin City Council

The Dublin Festival of History is an annual free festival, brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with the Dublin City Council Culture Company. The Festival has gain
4/12/2022

George III: The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch - Andrew Roberts in Conversation with Lisa Marie Griffith

Season 2021, Ep. 11
George III, Britain’s longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as ‘the cruellest tyrant of this age’. Andrew Roberts’s new biography takes entirely the opposite view. It portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong sense of honour and duty.He was a devoted husband and family man, a great patron of the arts and sciences, keen to advance Britain’s agricultural capacity (‘Farmer George’) and determined that her horizons should be global. He could be stubborn and self-righteous, but he was also brave, brushing aside numerous assassination attempts, galvanising his ministers and generals at moments of crisis and stoical in the face of his descent – five times during his life – into a horrifying loss of mind.Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.Lisa Marie Griffith is author of ‘Dublin: Then and Now’ and ‘Stones of Dublin: A History of Dublin in Ten Buildings’ and has published a number of essays on Dublin history. She is co-editor of two edited collections of essays, ‘Leaders of the City: Dublin’s first citizens, 1500–1950’ and ‘Death and Dying in Dublin: 1500 to the Present’.The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.
4/7/2022

The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire - Julie Kavanagh in Conversation with Roy Foster

Season 2021, Ep. 10
On a sunlit evening in 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon’s blades.The murders ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A new spirit of goodwill had been burgeoning between Prime Minister William Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell, with both men forging in secret a pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland – with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protégé, to play an instrumental role.The impact of the Phoenix Park murders was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the pact, almost brought down the government and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century.Julie Kavanagh is a renowned journalist, former New Yorker London editor, former arts editor of Harpers & Queen and Costa Biography Award finalist.Roy Foster is a distinguished Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford.The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.
3/31/2022

Four Killings: Land, Hunger, Murder & Family in the Irish Revolution - Myles Dungan in Conversation with Catriona Crowe

Season 2021, Ep. 8
Myles Dungan’s family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915 and 1922. Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from County Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by a powerful rancher’s hired assassin; three more died in Ireland, and each death is compellingly reconstructed in this extraordinary book. Mark Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian ‘bandits’ who resented his family’s possession of some disputed acres; his killer was tried and executed by the dead man’s relatives and comrades in the Meath IRA. A mentally challenged youth was shot as an informer by another relative of Dungan’s, and buried in secrecy and silence.Myles Dungan’s book, focused on one family, offers an original perspective on this still controversial period: a prism through which the moral and personal costs of violence, and the elemental conflict over land, come alive.Myles Dungan is an Irish broadcaster and author. He has presented many arts programmes on RTÉ Radio, and has also been a sports broadcaster on RTÉ Television. Since October 2010 he has been the presenter of “The History Show” on RTÉ Radio One.Catriona Crowe is one of Ireland’s leading historians and commentators. She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2012.The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company.