In November 1925, 19 men were sprung from Mountjoy by George Gilmore, a young maverick Republican. A few short months later, he carried out an even more impressive action - breaking the famous Jack Keogh out of Dundrum Lunatic Asylum. 

Through history, many changes to Dublin have been proposed and never realised. These included concreting over the canals, an art gallery on the Liffey and, perhaps most famously, a Temple Bar bus station. This podcast explores the Dublin that could have been.

How many eager Dubliners can you fit into Dalymount Park? On 5 February 1985, more than forty thousand of us somehow squeezed in to watch Ireland take on the Azzurri. At a time when Ireland was mad for Italian football - in no small part thanks to a Whitehall boy - the game could have resulted in tragedy.

The end of the War of Independence in Dublin was a strange thing: Even on the very day a truce was being negotiated, the IRA was planning a spectacular. But were they capable of doing it? Who was Margaret Keogh, the Cumann na mBan activist killed at the very end of the conflict? And what was different about Dublin in 1921? My guest is Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, author of a study of the Truce.

Christopher Robson took more than two thousand images of Pride and gay rights activism in Dublin from 1992 onwards, some of which are now on display in the National Photographic Archive. They capture iconic Dublin faces like Thom McGinty - the Diceman - and a city in a time of transition and change. 

Few writers are as fondly remembered in Dublin as Con Houlihan. Even in his own lifetime, a series of testimonials were erected to him in public houses he frequented. On paper a sportswriter, Con was something much broader. His story touches on things as diverse as the Evening Press, Saint Patrick's Athletic, Welsh miners and Mulligans.

Arguably the most influential Dublin-born politician of the modern age was Edward Carson, the unlikely figurehead of Unionism who played no small role in the partition of Ireland. Cormac Moore, author of Birth of The Border, joins me to discuss Carson and Unionism more broadly, at a time when contemporary Unionism seems in freefall.

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!

In the 1960s, American director Joseph Strick did what many felt was impossible - he brought Ulysses to screen. There was a fistfight at the Cannes Film Festival, segregated audiences in New Zealand and  complaints from the League of Decency at home.

The great hope of 1960s Dublin housing, Ballymun, followed on from the 1963 tenement collapse. As homes collapsed in the city centre, killing four Dubliners, it was a time for new thinking on working class housing. There was activism and anger in the city, but Dublin itself seemed to continue expanding into new suburbia.

Few streets in Dublin have the history of Capel Street - and now, it seems destined for major change. This podcast explores a street with an architeictural history stretching back to pre-Georgian times, and at the heart of change in more recent decades.