The Guinness family and the shaping of Dublin 1868-1927

This dissertation examines the role the Guinness family played in the shaping of Dublin between the death of
Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness in 1868 and the passing of his youngest son, Edward Cecil
Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, in 1927. It looks at how the Guinnesses impacted both the city
and the county of Dublin not only physically but across the spheres of culture, industry,
philanthropy, politics, public health, society, and religion. It is reductive and one dimensional
to see the Guinnesses simply as generous fringe figures who selflessly applied their income
from making beer to alleviate the malaise that surrounded them. Generous they were and the
family did ameliorate the difficult living conditions for many of their fellow citizens, but they
were not acting on the fringes. They were major players who worked to place themselves at
the centre of the Irish establishment. Their philanthropic initiatives should also be seen as
vehicles to achieve their own ambitions and shape public opinion. They were major political
actors, often working behind the scenes to maintain the status quo.
The rise of threats from within, including Irish nationalism, agitation for land reform, and
triumphal Catholicism, mixed with an infiltration of external influences such as leftwing
ideologies in the form is socialism and syndicalism combined to bring the Guinness’s world
crashing down. The irony is that even as the Guinness family were working to ensconce
themselves firmly within the Protestant Ascendancy that world was already slipping away.
The central argument of this thesis is that the Guinnesses tried to arrest this decline of by using
Dublin as a bulwark, and that even after the achievement of Irish independence in 1922 they
aVempted to salvage as many remnants of Ireland’s ancient régime as they could