Until the Tudor period (1485-1603), Dublin remained a typical medieval town, rising and falling with the tides of overcrowding and related problems such as epidemics and famines. The Anglo-Norman dominance was limited to an area known as ‘the Pale’, loosely corresponding to the area known as Greater Dublin today (this is where the saying ‘beyond the pale’ comes from, meaning beyond convention). Beyond those boundaries, Ireland remained untamed until Henry VIII consolidated his power across the island. Having split England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1531, he declared himself the head of an Anglicised Irish Church and in 1541, the King of Ireland. Decades of persecution of Catholics followed under Henry VIII’s youngest daughter Elizabeth I, leaving a former majority pushed to the margins of society, dispossessed of their houses of worship and often their employment. As the resentment among the oppressed Catholic majority grew against the ‘English’ capital, Oliver Cromwell appeared on the scene, obsessed with the idea that Ireland could be a threat to England and thus aiming to personally reassert English control throughout. It was a period that was forever going to cast a shadow over neighbourly relations and would see Cromwell go down in history as a perpetrator of shameful acts of military action – around 3,000 Irish soldiers were killed in just one night, some of them burnt alive in a church. The first plantations followed the ‘flight of the Earls’, with nearly 15 million acres of land being taken from Catholic owners and redistributed amongst Cromwell’s supporters (www.flight of the earls.ie).

Meanwhile, Anglican Dublin, having escaped Cromwell’s reign largely unharmed, entered its ‘belle epoque’ in the 17th century, during which time the arts were celebrated and the city’s face took the shape we know today, with the construction of Temple Bar, Customs House and the Four Courts to name but a few. Yet, as the likes of G F Handel and Oliver Goldsmith walked Dublin’s new broad and neoclassical streets, they had little idea that in the underbelly of their redesigned city, an explosive mix of anger and resentment was coming to the boil.