Dublin has experienced great—and often astonishing—change in its 1,400 year history. It has been the largest urban center on a deeply contested island since towns first appeared west of the Irish Sea. There have been other contested cities in the European and Mediterranean world, but almost no European capital city, David Dickson maintains, has seen sharper discontinuities and reversals in its history—and these have left their mark on Dublin and its inhabitants. Dublin occupies a unique place in Irish history and the Irish imagination. To chronicle its vast and varied history is to tell the story of Ireland. David Dickson’s magisterial history brings Dublin vividly to life beginning with its medieval incarnation and progressing through the neoclassical eighteenth century, when for some it was the “Naples of the North,” to the Easter Rising that convulsed a war-weary city in 1916, to the bloody civil war that followed the handover of power by Britain, to the urban renewal efforts at the end of the millennium. He illuminates the fate of Dubliners through the centuries—clergymen and officials, merchants and land speculators, publishers and writers, and countless others—who have been shaped by, and who have helped to shape, their city. He reassesses 120 years of Anglo-Irish Union, during which Dublin remained a place where rival creeds and politics struggled for supremacy. A book as rich and diverse as its subject, Dublin reveals the intriguing story behind the making of a capital city.

Despite dealing with housing as one of the core issues of individuals' well-being and life situation, Cathal O'Connell's subject matter -- and approach -- is oriented towards an issue that is going far beyond the question of well-being, living standards and redistribution issues. Housing, or more generally, accommodation is a fundamental expression -- and building block -- of societies, and as such it has to be understood as core issue of socialisation, i.e. of the mode in which a society builds up its own identity and integrity. Thus, the lesson from O'Connell's systematically researched, deeply and in details informed work is reaching far beyond national housing issues. And it is in this sense that they are an important contribution to explain as well some of the general challenges of European integration.

This is Volume V of thirteen of a collection on Urban and Regional Sociology. Originally published in 1966, this study looks at the kinship in Irish families, including their characteristic cultural patterns and effects of urbanization.

Annotation Originally published in 1966.