The second series of ‘Dublin’s Hidden Histories’ in partnership with community radio station Near FM returns this May for a series of live recorded talks in the Trinity Long Room Hub and Unit18 (Trinity in the Community). Unit18 is a new addition to this year’s series to engage with the Pearse Street community and create a space for dialogue around a range of topics under discussion.
The new series will feature Trinity researchers and staff in conversation with Near FM’s Ciarán Murray. From the story of ‘lost’ Dublin orphan Annie Faires to Dublin’s forgotten factories, the series will start in Dublin’s middle ages and bring us right up to the more recent history of Dublin’s inner-city.
The interviews will be recorded for radio in front of a live public audience at the Trinity Long Room Hub and Unit18 and subsequently broadcast on Near FM, with songs from An Góilín Traditional Singing Club.
The series is a follow-on from the successful series run in spring 2025, available to listen back to here.
Professor Patrick Geoghegan, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub said:
“This partnership with NearFM and Unit18 helps us to engage with diverse publics and ensure a wider awareness of our mission to provide free, educational and cultural initiatives for the general public. We’re also delighted to showcase some of the fantastic research and wonderful stories coming from Trinity’s Arts and Humanities and look forward to engaging with the audience in this conversation as always.”
Mary Colclough, Community & Enterprise Engagement Manager at Unit18 commented:
“Unit18 is Trinity’s dedicated space for civic engagement – a place for the College to get to know our neighbours. Dublin’s Hidden Histories provides a great opportunity not only for Trinity’s academics to present to the people of Dublin, but for local communities to share their stories of the city, from the factories they worked in to the streets where they lived. We are delighted to be working with the Long Room Hub on this initiative and hope with the extended reach through Near FM that we can open Trinity to greater and more diverse audiences”
Ciarán Murray, Near Media Co-op Project Coordinator, said:
“I'm not a historian but I love the history of my city, and not so much the famous history of great statesmen and heroes but the lived history of ordinary people, sometimes forgotten and invisible people, often women and the poor, the factory and mill workers, the biscuit makers and seamstresses. Many of these are like NPCs ('non-playing characters' in computer games, as my children would say), like a backdrop to history, as if their stories and their legacies didn't also shape the city we live in and the people we are. I'm really looking forward to discussing all this with the historians and hearing from the audiences too.”
6 May 2026: Dublin’s Middle-Aged Boom
11.00am at the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
Dr Sparky Booker, Assistant Professor in Medieval Irish History at TCD, will speak about the Irish population of the city in the later middle ages. Dublin was a colonial capital and seat of the colonial administration, right at the centre of the Pale, but it was also home to a great many Irish men and women, living and working alongside their English neighbours. Dr Booker and Near FM presenter, Ciarán Murray will discuss how those Irish people (a growing population in the later middle-ages) navigated discriminatory laws against them and were able to play a major role in the city's society and economy.
6 May 2026: Forgotten Factories of Inner-City Dublin
12.15 at the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
In this episode, presenter Ciarán Murray is joined by Professor Frank Barry (Emeritus Professor of International Business and Economic Development at TCD) to explore the vanished industrial landscape of inner-city Dublin. Once home to bustling bakeries, breweries, sweet factories, foundries, textile mills and shipyards, the city’s streets echoed with the sounds of production and the lives of thousands of workers.
13 May 2026: Recovering ‘lost’ stories from the Library of Trinity College Dublin
11.00am at Unit18
In this Library special, we uncover some fascinating ‘lost’ stories from the pages of the Library collections, including the day-to-day lives of a 19th century Summerhill couple and the story of orphan ‘Annie Faires’ . Presenter Ciarán Murray will be joined by Jane Maxwell, Assistant Librarian, Manuscripts & Archives Research Collections, Trinity College Dublin and Tony Flynn, PHD candidate, School of English.
May 13th at Unit 18 (Pearse Street):
13 May 2026: Filthy Queens: women in Dublin’s brewing trade
12.15 at Unit18
In this conversation, Dr Christina Wade will speak to presenter Ciarán Murray about the history of women and beer alongside some of the biggest events in the story of Ireland. Dr Wade will provide some fascinating stories of an 18th-century courtesan who had a wicked streak of beer snobbery, and of medieval brewing women who defied regulations to make ale their own way. She will tell the audience about the hidden histories of brewing women.
20 May 2026: Catherine Strong, Dung Queen of Dublin
11.00 at the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
This live interview will feature the story of Catherine Strong, Dublin’s official city “scavenger” tasked with running sanitation teams to clear the streets of human and animal waste. Audiences will hear how over four centuries ago Catherine Strong earned her money through levies on shopkeepers and traders but when the dung began to pile up and the stench spread across the city, her career in public service ended. Professor Jane Ohlmeyer (Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin) will tell the audience how things went spectacularly wrong for Catherine but how she in turn profited by setting herself up subsequently as a moneylender.
All talks available to book here:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/events/trinity-talks-dublins-hidden-histories-/
These talks will be subsequently broadcast on Near FM. You can listen to Near FM online www.nearfm.ie/livestream or on 90.3FM.
Please note that some of these talks will be held at the Trinity Long Room Hub and some will be held at Unit 18 (Pearse Street).