Drimnagh

Drimnagh derives its name from the word druimneach, or country with ridges. A Neolithic settlement discovered, and a funerary bowl found in a burial site. The site was demolished, but the bowl is on view in the National Museum.

The lands of Drimnagh were taken from their Irish owners by Strongbow, who gave them to the Barnwell family, who had arrived in Ireland with Strongbow in 1167 and had settled in Berehaven in Munster. The people of Munster killed the family except for Hugh de Barnwell, and it was this youth who was given Drimnagh as compensation. The lands and castle were considered safe, for they were far enough away from the Dublin mountains which held Irish strongholds.

Drimnagh was farmland until the mid-1930s, when some of the first tenement clearances brought city centre residents from one-room hovels to terraced and semi-detached houses in a series of roads named after the mountain ranges of Ireland. The suburb consists of one area close to Drimnagh Castle and Lansdowne Valley, with three-bedroom private housing built by Associated Properties, and another area (the larger part) built by Dublin Corporation and consisting of three bedroom 'Kitchen Houses' and two bedroom 'Parlour Houses' and bordering the Grand Canal and Crumlin. The two areas meet at the parish church, the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the centre of Drimnagh, built in 1943.

The Dublin Corporation housing area was originally considered part of an area known as North Crumlin from its construction in the mid-1930s until the introduction of the postal code system during the mid-1970s.