Families of County Dublin
Dubhlinn, the Norse longphort, the Anglo-Norman capital, the seat of the Lordship of Ireland.
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Families of County Dublin
- PearseThe surname of the first signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
- WildeThe Roscommon planter line, the surgeon-archaeologist, and the writer who lost his name to a trial.
- SwiftThe Yorkshire-Swift attorney's son, Dean of St Patrick's, Drapier, Gulliver.
- GuinnessEarls of Iveagh, brewers and statesmen since 1759.
Historic ties to Dublin
Families with historic but not core ground in this county.
Champions of County Dublin
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in County Dublin.
- Christopher NolanThe London-born director who made Memento on a million dollars, wrote and directed the Dark Knight trilogy, took the Best Director Oscar for Oppenheimer in 2024, and brought the puzzle-narrative blockbuster back to commercial Hollywood.
- Cornelius RyanThe Dublin clerk's son who reported the Eighth Air Force from England, came ashore on D-Day for Reuters, and wrote The Longest Day, The Last Battle and A Bridge Too Far on the principle that military history is a thousand small first-person testimonies, not the commander's dispatch.
- Sir Charles Gavan DuffyThe Monaghan shoemaker's son who co-founded The Nation in Dublin in 1842, was tried five times for sedition and never convicted, served as Premier of Victoria, and became the figure of the Australian and Irish post-Famine diaspora.
- James CallaghanThe Portsmouth chief petty officer's son who left school at seventeen, served as a Royal Navy lieutenant, sat for Cardiff for forty-two years, and is the only person to have held all four great offices of state: Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister.
- Maeve BrennanThe Dublin Republican family's daughter who moved to New York at seventeen, joined the New Yorker in 1949, and wrote the Manhattan column The Long-Winded Lady and the Ranelagh stories that William Maxwell called the Irish-English short-story voice of the post-war American magazine.
- Gabriel ByrneThe Walkinstown plumber's son who taught archaeology and Spanish before turning to acting at twenty-nine, played Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing and Dean Keaton in The Usual Suspects, and the psychiatrist Paul Weston for forty-three episodes of HBO's In Treatment.
- J. G. FarrellThe Anglo-Irish novelist who wrote Troubles, the Booker-winning The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, the Empire trilogy on the slow decline of empire that stands among the most significant English-language fiction of the later twentieth century.
- Edel QuinnThe Cork bank-cashier's daughter who entered the Legion of Mary despite a tuberculosis diagnosis that gave her months, was sent as the Legion's envoy to East and Central Africa in 1936, founded over six hundred local Legion praesidia across the region, and was declared Venerable by John Paul II.
- J. W. DunneThe Anglo-Irish Boer War officer who designed the first inherently-stable aircraft, the swept-wing Dunne D.5 of 1910, then wrote An Experiment with Time (1927), the popular text on precognitive dreams that influenced J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot, Olaf Stapledon and Jorge Luis Borges.
- John Boyle O'ReillyThe Meath schoolmaster's son who enlisted in the British Hussars as an IRB agent, was transported to Western Australia, escaped on an American whaler, ran the Boston Pilot, planned the 1876 Catalpa rescue of six Fenian prisoners, and was the Irish-American literary-political figure of the post-Civil-War generation.
- Brian FitzpatrickThe Warrnambool dairy-farmer's son and Melbourne University historian who wrote British Imperialism and Australia and The Australian People 1788-1945, founded the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, and is the foundational figure of Australian academic economic historiography.
- John McLaughlinThe Doncaster violinist's son who taught himself jazz guitar, played on Miles Davis's In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew at the foundation of jazz-rock fusion, founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and built the Shakti Indian-jazz partnership with Zakir Hussain across five decades.
- John SweeneyThe Tonbridge Catholic-school journalist who joined The Observer in 1986, became BBC Panorama's lead investigative reporter, exposed Scientology and Russian state-sponsored assassination across two decades, and has covered the war in Ukraine from Kyiv and Lviv since 2022.
- Errol FlynnThe Hobart marine-biologist's son who roamed the western Pacific in his twenties, came to England for the repertory stage, was cast as Captain Blood at twenty-six, and became the definitive swashbuckling Hollywood lead of the late 1930s and 1940s.
- Liam GallagherThe Burnage Manchester Irish-immigrant family's youngest son who fronted Oasis from 1991 alongside his brother Noel, gave Britpop its definitive voice across Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and reunited the band in 2024 for the British live-music event of the post-pandemic decade.
- George Francis FitzGeraldThe Trinity College Dublin physicist who in 1883 set out the principle on which Hertz would build the first radio waves, and in 1889 proposed the length contraction that became one half of the foundation of special relativity.
- Arthur GuinnessThe Kildare brewer who in 1759 took a nine-thousand-year lease on a four-acre Dublin yard and built from it the largest brewery in the world.
- Oscar WildeThe Dublin-born Trinity classicist whose Picture of Dorian Gray, Importance of Being Earnest and Ballad of Reading Gaol fixed the wit of the late Victorian English-language stage and the prose-poem of late-romantic protest.
- W. B. YeatsThe Sligo-rooted poet who founded the Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory in 1904, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 as the first Irish laureate, and made the English-language poem the central instrument of the Irish national imagination.
- Jonathan SwiftThe Dublin-born Trinity classicist and Anglican cleric whose Gulliver's Travels, Modest Proposal and Drapier's Letters set the model for English-language political satire and made him the public conscience of Hanoverian Ireland.
- Edmund BurkeThe Dublin-born Trinity classicist whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) set the foundational text of modern English-language political conservatism and whose parliamentary speeches on American conciliation and Indian government are on every list of the greatest political oratory in the English language.
- Charles Stewart ParnellThe Wicklow Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord who built the Irish Parliamentary Party into the disciplined eighty-six-vote bloc that held the balance of power at Westminster, forced the Liberal government to introduce the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886, and earned the title the Uncrowned King of Ireland.
- Patrick PearseThe Dublin-born Gaelic League barrister and Irish-language schoolmaster who founded St Enda's bilingual school at Rathfarnham in 1908 and on the twenty-fourth of April 1916 read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office.
- James ConnollyThe Edinburgh-born Irish socialist organiser who founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896, built with James Larkin the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union into the central institution of Irish labour, and as Commandant of the Dublin Brigade led the working-class regiments of the 1916 Easter Rising.
- Sir Roger CasementThe Antrim-born British consul whose Congo Report of 1904 and Putumayo Report of 1911 exposed the Belgian and Peruvian rubber-atrocity systems to the world and earned him the knighthood of Edward the Seventh.
- Tom ClarkeThe Dungannon-raised Fenian veteran who served fifteen and a half years of penal servitude in English prisons from 1883 to 1898, rebuilt the Irish Republican Brotherhood from his Dublin tobacconist's shop on the eve of the First World War, and as oldest signatory of the Proclamation in 1916 was the central organising figure of the Easter Rising.
- Michael DavittThe Mayo cottier's son evicted from the family holding in the Famine year of 1850 who in 1879 founded the Irish National Land League at Irishtown, broke the landlord system in Ireland through the Land War of 1879 to 1882, and laid the institutional foundations of the constitutional Irish independence movement.
- Tim HealyThe Bantry-born barrister and parliamentarian whose forty-five-year career across the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Sinn Féin period culminated in 1922 in his appointment as the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State, the office through which the Irish state took its constitutional identity within and beyond the British Commonwealth.
- Jack LynchThe Cork hurler who took six successive All-Ireland senior medals on the Cork hurling and football fields between 1941 and 1946, served forty years as Fianna Fáil TD for Cork, and as Taoiseach 1966 to 1973 and 1977 to 1979 led the Republic of Ireland through the foundational decade of EEC membership and the Northern Ireland crisis.
- Brian BoruThe Dál gCais chief of Munster who through the years 976 to 1002 unified the Irish kingdoms under his single overlordship, took the high-kingship at Tara in 1002 as the first non-Uí Néill High King of Ireland, and at Clontarf on Good Friday 1014 broke the political power of the Norse over Dublin.
- Sinéad O'ConnorThe Dublin-born singer-songwriter whose 1990 recording of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U topped the charts in seventeen countries, sold seventeen million copies of the parent album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and made her the central single Irish musical voice of the late twentieth century.
- Joseph Mary PlunkettThe Dublin poet and translator who drafted the military plan of the Easter Rising at the family house at Larkfield, Kimmage, signed the Proclamation as Director of Military Operations and was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol on the morning of the fourth of May 1916 seven hours after his wedding to Grace Gifford in the prison chapel.
- Maurice WalshThe Kerry-born Customs officer turned novelist whose 1933 Saturday Evening Post short story The Quiet Man became, in John Ford's 1952 adaptation with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, the Academy Award-winning film that fixed a certain idea of Ireland onto twentieth-century world cinema.
- Mary RobinsonThe Ballina-born constitutional lawyer who from December 1990 to September 1997 served as the seventh President of Ireland and the first woman to hold the office, and from September 1997 to September 2002 as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the central international human-rights post of the post-Cold-War era.
- James PowerThe Kilkenny publican who in 1791 set up a small pot-still at the corner of Thomas Street and John's Lane in Dublin and built from it the Power's distillery that by the 1880s was the largest single-distillery operation in the world.
- Rory O'CarrollThe Crumlin-born Kilmacud Crokes full-back whose seven seasons as the central defender of the Dublin senior football team from 2010 to 2015 anchored the back line that took three All-Ireland Senior Football Championships (2011, 2013 and 2015) and four Leinster Senior Football Championships in the foundation period of the modern Dublin dynasty.
- Sir William Rowan HamiltonThe Dublin-born Royal Astronomer of Ireland whose 1834 to 1835 papers on Hamiltonian mechanics reframed the foundations of classical physics, and whose discovery of the quaternion algebra on the Brougham Bridge over the Royal Canal on the sixteenth of October 1843 founded modern algebraic non-commutative number systems and the mathematical foundations of three-dimensional rotation that today govern every computer-graphics, robotics and spacecraft-attitude calculation.
Stories told here
Legends set in County Dublin, from any family that carries them.