Dublin Port Heritage Director Lar Joye’s has been working to catalogue, preserve and digitise the port’s 300-year-old archive, which is estimated to include some 75,000 photographs and 30,000 engineering drawings, as well as maps and administration files dating back to 1707.

The archive contains photography in many forms, from black and white prints to 35mm colour slides from the 1950s and 1960s. Of particular interest are a number of delicate glass plate negatives from the 1920s and 1930s which have been developed for the very first time, thanks to modern preservation methods and scanning equipment capable of reading the original negatives.

The photographs reveal a bustling port and show dock workers going about their daily work, including some tasks which no longer exist today. Workers can be seen weighing tobacco and moving peat moss, while a fleet of tiny Heinkel Kabine microcars wait to be exported. These microcars were manufactured for a brief period of time in Dundalk in the late 1950s.

Find out more by visiting the Dublin Port Archive here