Who's behind this thing?

The History of Ireland is put together by Kevin Dolan. That's me. I'm not a historian — just a bit of a history nerd who realised I didn't know nearly enough about my home country's past.

I was living in Australia, fielding the same questions at every barbecue: why is there a Northern Ireland and a Republic? Why is there a border? What's the deal with Brexit and Ireland? At first I thought the questions were a bit ignorant. Then I realised I only had a vague idea myself. Tá brón orm.

So I went down the rabbit hole — reading everything I could find on the founding of the Irish State — and started cornering people at parties with stories from the revolution. When I went looking for a podcast that told the whole thing in order and couldn't find one, I did the reasonable thing: started my own, in the style of the great History of Rome.

That was 2019. Since then the show has worked through the War of Independence and the Treaty (Season 1), the Civil War (Season 2), and has now gone right back to the beginning — Newgrange, the Tuatha Dé, and the mythology underneath it all (Season 3). The Vikings are on the horizon.