Taking Pride in Our Past

Port Heritage Director Lar Joye provides an update on the ongoing work to catalogue the extensive collection in the Dublin Port Archive.

During 2019, the heritage team at Dublin Port Archive continued cataloguing the collection, preparing material for scanning and revamping the Dublin Port Archive website.

Glenbeigh Records Management scanned the Port registers prior to 1850, creating a preservation copy of them for researchers. One particular project involved having parts of the Port’s museum collections photographed, including a very rare, solid silver Irish trowel which marked the opening of George’s Dock in 1817. Work began on scanning the older engineering maps, which includes rare drawings of South Bull Wall signed by the famous Port Engineer, Bindon Blood Stoney.

Dublin Port Memory and Story Project

In 2019, we also began working with Dr Tomás Mac Conmara, Oral Historian and Heritage Consultant, on the Dublin Port Memory and Story Project, which will allow us to interview current and retired members of the Port staff.

In 2019, the Archive website was overhauled, with additional material added to the site, including a rare film of tea arriving from India and the glass plate negatives of the expansion of the Port in the 1920s. To mark Archive week in November 2019, a short film about the archive was created by the social media team.

Following the success of the project in 2018, lectures were once again arranged to tie in with Heritage Week in August and the Dublin History Festival in October, which included talks on the submarine war fought around Ireland in the last two years of World War One and a talk and walking tour of ever popular Diving Bell on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Dublin’s smallest museum is now receiving 100,000 visitors a year.

In November, we hosted the Dublin Book Festival and lecture by Michael Brannigan, who will be publishing a book about the Dublin Port called Moving East.