Qualla: County Dublin

County Dublin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

County Dublin was the first place in Ireland to be shired, established by the Normans within a generation of their 1170 invasion as the administrative core of what would become English rule in Ireland. It is one of the three smallest counties in the country by area - just 922 square kilometres - but the most populous by far, home to 1,458,154 people at the 2022 census, roughly 28 percent of the entire population of the Republic. Until 1994 it was a single local government area; in that year the county council was split into three administrative counties - Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal, and South Dublin - with Dublin City as the fourth authority. The four together still form what everyone calls County Dublin, even though the county council that gave them their shared name no longer exists. The boundary runs from the Wicklow Mountains in the south to the flat fertile horticulture country of north Fingal, taking in 1.46 million people, an airport hub, the Liffey from Leixlip to the sea, and the highest GDP per capita in Ireland.

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County Dublin: From Mesolithic Fish Trap to Norman County

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The oldest evidence of human settlement in Dublin is a set of wooden fish traps found near Spencer Dock in 2007, radiocarbon-dated to around 5,700 BC - the late Mesolithic, when small groups of hunter-gatherers worked the tidal flats at the mouth of the Liffey, setting weirs to c...

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County Dublin: The Pale and the Tenements

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the early sixteenth century, English authority in Ireland had retreated from most of the island. What survived was a small area around Dublin known as the Pale - effectively the modern counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and the eastern part of Kildare - within which English law...

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County Dublin: The Three Counties and the City

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 1 January 1994 the old Dublin County Council was abolished and three new administrative counties came into being: Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown to the southeast, with the wealthiest housing in the country along its coast; South Dublin to the southwest, with the sprawling 1970s-built ...

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County Dublin: The City of Migrants

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Approximately a quarter of County Dublin's population - around 25 percent - was born outside the Republic of Ireland. This is the highest proportion of any county in the country. Historically the largest foreign-born group was British, dominated by people from the United Kingdom ...

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County Dublin: The Money and the Mountains

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dublin is Europe's largest financial centre outside Frankfurt, London, and Luxembourg. The International Financial Services Centre at the Dublin Docklands, established as a special economic zone in 1987, administers over 1.8 trillion euro of funds as of 2020 - a figure larger tha...

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