Ranelagh has been the setting for a number of literary and film works, such as Lee Dunne's Goodbye to the Hill and John McGahern's The Pornographer.

The district is well-connected by public transport, including the Luas Green Line tram and bus routes.

On Easter Monday in 1207, a celebrating group of English inhabitants of Dublin were attacked here by Irish raiders from county Wicklow.

[4] In the 1520s and 1530s Cullenswood was held by the de Meones family, who also owned, and gave their name to, nearby Meonesrath, now Rathmines.

[5] In the early years of the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–1649), the area was the scene of skirmishes culminating in the Battle of Rathmines in August 1649.

Their army under Ormonde was defeated, many of them killed, and the place where they fell (mainly between Rathmines and Ranelagh) was known for a long time as the Bloody Fields.

[12] In 1785, only two years after the first manned flight in history, Richard Crosbie successfully flew in a hot air balloon from Ranelagh Gardens to Clontarf.

[14] In the 1970s and 1980s, areas of Ranelagh were bought up with the intention of developing the sites as office space, during a boom period of such construction in the wider city.

One development site, purchased in 1972 by Fergus Morton, was a former builder's yard near Athlumney Villas, a terrace of artisan houses.

Morton employed Delaney McVeigh and Pike to draw up a plan for two large office blocks on the site.

The site was sold with the planning permission a number of times until it was purchased by the Construction Industry Federation, who built the office blocks, completing them in 1983.

The area, popularly known today as Ranelagh, also includes parts of the adjoining townlands of Cullenswood, Sallymount and Milltown.

[17] Lios na nÓg, another gaelscoil, is located in Cullenswood House on Oakley Road, where St. Enda's School (Scoil Éanna) was set up by Patrick Pearse in 1908.

[18] The 1965 movie Young Cassidy, starring Maggie Smith and Rod Taylor, was filmed in parts of Ranelagh.