Nuacht
Nuacht | 31 Iúil 2025
Eat, Sleep, History Repeat! A podcast made with St Catherine's National School
Dublin City Historians in Residence work in neighbourhoods across the city to encourage local people to engage with history, and to promote its sources and discussion, especially the historical collections in Dublin City Library and Archive.
By engaging with local communities and keeping people front and centre of history, the Historians in Residence help the people of Dublin City feel a connection to their local history.
The historians work with a wide range of people across Dublin, to share local history and occasionally give people the tools to research history themselves.
In the 2024/25 school year our historians worked with schools and community colleges in both north and south Dublin to help students learn about history and how to study history on their own. Here is the experience from our Historian in Residence for Children, Dervilia Roche, working with the children of 4th class at St Catherine’s National School, Donore Avenue, to create their very own local history podcast: Eat, Sleep, History, Repeat!
Over seven weeks, the children learned all about their local history, through workshops, history walks, and doing their own research in class. From the rich history of the area, they chose their four favourite topics to base the podcast on: the World War II bombing of South Circular Road, the history of weaving in the Liberties, the whiskey fire of 1875, and the network of underground rivers in the area.
They recorded a podcast based around their discussion of these four topics, and created their own theme tunes and funny fake ads. The class worked hard and had lots of fun becoming historians and podcast-making experts!
Here are some of the things they had to say about the project:
‘The podcast was soooo much fun! We had lots of laughs and slays.’
‘It was interesting learning about where I live. I like learning about old history too. It was just really fun.’
‘I loved the recording part of it. I found it exciting.’
The project was facilitated by Historian in Residence for Children Dervilia Roche in collaboration with comedy and children’s writer Aidan Fitzmaurice, and the Digital Hub. The podcast is hosted on Dublin City Libraries and Digital Hub channels and can be accessed here: