It is the birthplace of Sam Maguire, an Irish Protestant republican, for whom the trophy of the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is named.

[4] The town came to national and international attention in 2009 when Liverpool Football Club played a pre-season soccer friendly in the area.

For example, in Irish Local Names Explained (first published in 1870), the historian and etymologist Patrick Weston Joyce gives the meaning as "the fort of the gables (or pinnacles)".

19th-century references date the founding of Dunmanway to the late 17th century, when the English crown settled a colony there to provide a resting place for troops marching between Bandon and Bantry.

In 1693, Cox obtained a grant from King William III to hold market days and fairs in the town and strongly encouraged the development of the local flax industry.

He sponsored numerous incentives for local residents involved in making linen, including rent-free housing for top producers, bonuses for efficient labourers, rewards for schoolgirls who showed strong loom skills, and production contests with generous prizes.

It also recorded the town's changing economic fortunes: "The manufacture of linen continued to flourish for some years, but at present there are very few looms at work.

that our American sisters could see the labourers on our roads, able-bodied men, scarcely clad, famishing with hunger, with despair in their once cheerful faces, staggering at their work ... oh!

that they could see the dead father, mother or child, lying coffinless and hear the screams of the survivors around them, caused not by sorrow, but by the agony of hunger.

[20] As of the 2016 census, the population (of 1,655) included a small number of people from the United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere within the European Union.

[31] The Dunmanway Agricultural Show, first held in 1946, takes place on the first Sunday in July each year, and with contested classes including horses, cattle and horticulture.

[citation needed] The club is named in honour of Michael Doheny, a member of the Young Ireland nationalist movement who lived in the area for a short period.

[citation needed] The local soccer club is Dunmanway Town, which plays in the Premier Division of the West Cork League.

won the game by one goal to nil in front of 6,800 fans, and Gardaí estimated that more than 15,000 people visited Dunmanway on the day to catch a glimpse of the Liverpool stars of the future.

[citation needed] Between 1975 and 1999, Swedish multinational firm Mölnlycke Health Care operated a manufacturing facility in Dunmanway.