Although born in County Clare, of old Cromwellian stock, and effectively exiled to the Netherlands and London through the 1750s, Charles Lucas ranks as one of the great Dubliners, radicals, pamphleteers, and journalists of eighteenth-century Ireland.

He mobilised the Trade Guilds to win one of the city’s two seats in parliament and was promptly disbarred. He then won re-election in 1760, and ‘got in’ as a government official put it ‘by cajoling the very scum of the people’.

Three years later he helped found The Freeman’s Journal. Fittingly memorialised by a statue in City Hall, Lucas deserves to be remembered as an exponent of Republicanism before the United Irishmen.

This event is presented by the Dublin Festival of History.

Click here to book.