ABSTRACT
For a very long time indeed, centuries in fact, Donnybrook had been one of Ireland's principal markets and fairs, and by that very token, a major scene of excitement and merriment for the mass of the people. The great commercial importance of the fair declined from the seventeenth century. In the summer of 1862 Joseph Dillon placarded his field and gates with posters proclaiming that Donnybrook Fair would commence on 'Walking Sunday', 24 August, and that he had accommodation for tents, stands, cattle and horse trading, and for the erection of booths for the sale of drink by licensed traders. The crusade for the moral reform of Donnybrook was not exclusively the product of a resurgent Roman Catholicism. The Donnybrook Fair event proved one of the most memorable and impressive of public occasions in the life of Dublin and of Ireland in the nineteenth century.
