Dublin Gazette

The Virtual Treasury, in collaboration with the Oireachtas Library, the Library of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, the Free Library Company of Philadelphia and the National Library of Ireland, is compiling a collection of selected issues of the Gazette to illustrate the broad range of topics dealt with across the centuries of its publication. In between the daily business of government are items on trade, law and order, and moments of historical significance. Across hundreds of years and tens of thousands of issues a range of printers produced the Dublin Gazette, but the format remained remarkably consistent. Even at the end of British rule and the establishment of the Irish Free State – a moment of major constitutional upheaval – the same printer continued to produce the same sort of content in the usual two-column format, simply replacing the royal crest with the new title ‘Iris Oifigiúil’ (Official Gazette, or Magazine) in Gaelic typeface. The subtitle ‘published by authority never changed.

On the establishment of the Irish Free State the gazette continued as the official government publication, under the new title of Iris Oifigiúil. It still appears each Tuesday and Friday, in print and now online – an example of official records persisting for more than three centuries, and despite the profound constitutional changes of 1800 and 1922.