IRELAND'S first railway was opened between Dublin and Kingstown—now Dún Laoghaire—in 1834, just nine years after the pioneering Stockton and Darlington opened for traffic. The Irish line made history as the world’s first commuter railway. Steam-powered, it was built to the standard British gauge of four feet eight-and-a-half inches between the rails and today’s modern, electric DART trains still use the route on their way to and from Greystones.

ON THE night of Saturday March 11, 1923, more than 100 Irishmen and women across Britain were rudely awoken by police, arrested, before being bundled into train carriages and taken to ports across the country. Amid much confusion, these men and women were transported by boat (above) to Ireland and imprisoned. Their crime: anti-Treaty activities committed against the newly established Irish Free State, during the height of the Irish Civil War.

WHEN we think of a kilted soldier, we almost definitely think of someone very different from Ian MacKenzie Kennedy. He may have had—at times—a feather in his bunnet and a kilt upon his knee, but MacKenzie Kennedy was no representation of the clichéd Scottish martial spirit. He was, from early 1918, a soldier in the Irish Republican Army.

ON MARCH 12, 1925, the newly formed State police force, An Garda Síochána, launched a large-scale raid on Dublin’s notorious red-light district, the Monto, an operation ordered by Garda Commissioner William Murphy.