Tour Guides

Historical Walking Tours was set up with a very specific - and quite practical - aim: to provide post-graduate history students of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with an income during their years of study. Not only has it succeeded in keeping quite a few students alive long enough for them to receive their Doctorates, our main tour has won many awards and been acclaimed as the one "must-do" activity for any visitor to Dublin. Our guides have a passion about all aspects of Irish history and are happy to discuss anything which may be of specific interest to you.

"This is your best introductory walk. A group of hardworking history graduates - many of whom have claim to have done more than kissed the Blarney Stone - enliven Dublin's historic strip."
Rick Steve's Ireland

Tommy Graham

Tommy is a history graduate of Trinity College and founded Historical Walking Tours of Dublin in 1986. Since 1993 he has been editor of the bi-monthly History Ireland, the country's only illustrated history magazine. He lectures in Irish history and politics at the Dublin programme of Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Since 2007 he has been stand-in presenter of Newstalk 106-108's 'Talking History', a weekly 2-hour live radio show. At the 2010 Electric Picnic he kicked off his latest project, the History Ireland Hedge School an ongoing series of round table discussions of historical and contemporary interest.

Peter Ballagh

Peter is a graduate of Trinity College and has been involved with Historical Walking Tours of Dublin since 1997. He has worked as a secondary school teacher and as a trainer of adults with intellectual disability. Currently he reviews publications for the Heritage Council of Ireland and is a specialist in the INTO Heritage in Schools programme, for whom he gives talks on Ireland’s food culture. Since 2001 Peter has worked with EU election observations missions, most recently in Burundi and Cote d’Ivoire in 2010.

Carole Holohan

Carole was awarded a PhD in modern Irish history in 2009 for her socio-economic and cultural history of Irish young people in the sixties. She also has a particular interest in the 1916 Rising and has published on the commemoration of this event in 1916 in 1966, Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin, 2007). She is currently a researcher with Amnesty International (Ireland) and is analyzing the Ferns, Murphy and Ryan Reports which detail the abuse of children in residential institutions and in the community by agents of the Catholic Church.

John Gibney

John is a graduate of Trinity and the author of Ireland and the Popish Plot and of a number of articles for BBC NI, Éire-Ireland, Field Day Review and Irish Historical Studies. He is a regular contributor to History Ireland magazine, and was also a contributor to the RIA's Dictionary of Irish Biography. He has been a NEH research fellow at the University of Notre Dame, and a research fellow at NUI Galway. He has just completed The shadow of a year: the 1641 rebellion in Irish history and memory, and is also writing a biography of the 1916 commandant J.J. (‘Sean’) Heuston.

Lisa Marie Griffiths

Lisa Marie lectures in modern and early-modern Irish and European history at Carlow College. She holds a BA and MA from UCD and in 2008 completed a PhD in Trinity College, Dublin in eighteenth-century Irish history. From April 2005 until January 2006 she produced and presented the Anna Livia radio series Delving into Dublin's Past which covered a variety of aspects of Irish and Dublin history. She has coordinated and lectured on a Trinity extramural course called 'A history of Dublin, Danes, Deans and Dubliners' and is also one of four editors and contributors to the Blog Pue's Occurrences

Edward Madigan

Edward is a graduate of UCD and Trinity College where he was awarded a Ph.D. in modern European history. He specialises in the social and cultural history of early twentieth century Europe and has a particular interest in the British and Irish experience of the Great War. Edward has published several articles on the European experience of war in the modern period and his first book, Faith Under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War, was published in January 2011.

Gavin Finlay

Gavin is a graduate of Trinity College. His main area of interests include Medieval Ireland and Dublin's historical development; the Irish Diaspora, particularly 19th century emigration to the United States and Irish links with the Atlantic world. He has had work published in the bi-monthly History Ireland, the country's only illustrated history magazine. Gavin has also contributed to Film Ireland magazine, covering Irish cinema history and film reviews. He has experience working in the Irish Film Archive and is currently a search editor with Getty Images, working on archival content.

Cliona Rattigan

Clíona holds a BA and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. She recently completed her doctorate on the history of infanticide in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century. Her research was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is interested in the history of women in Ireland and also does several special walking tours, including 'Piety, Penance, Potatoes' and ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries'. She is currently based in Paris.

Grace O'Keefe

Grace holds both a BA and an MPhil in history from Trinity College Dublin. She is currently completing a PhD in TCD on the society of medieval Dublin. She has tutored undergraduates in medieval history and has taught English to foreign students in Dublin and South Korea, where she lived for a year. She is also a member of the Friends of Medieval Dublin which aims to protect the remains of and promote scholarship in medieval Dublin.

Donal Fallon

Donal’s main area of research and interest is the social history of the capital. He founded and writes for the award nominated website Come Here To Me!, which looks at the songs, history, politics and characters of the Irish capital. He has written on the history of Dublin on issues as diverse as the history of soccer to the War of Independence period. He has provided tours which specifically deal with the 1916 uprising in Dublin, the War of Independence and the civil war period. He is currently based at NUI Maynooth and focusing research on the political and social climate of 1930s Dublin.