Dublin, Ireland - February 2020

In February I took a break from clearing out my mother’s house and escaped to Ireland for a quick look around the cities of Dublin and Belfast.  I flew from Birmingham to Dublin, on RyanAir of course, for next to nothing ($20). In Dublin a quick bus trip into town where I got the chance to be anxious about two Chinese looking tourists with face masks getting on the bus.  In these Coronovirus days people like that are noticed and wouldn’t you know they came and sat right next to me on the bus. I am sure I will be fine.

I was staying out in Dun Laoghaire, the passenger ferry port for Dublin, so from the center of town I got the DART train out that way.  It is a very nice journey out on the side of the bay to Dun Laoghaire, the train goes right alongside the water. My hotel for the night was the Royal Maritime Hotel, a nice old building housing what was once (and perhaps still is) a fine hotel.  It sits above the harbour and is perhaps one of the more impressive buildings in the town. That is with the exception of the fine new library, the dlr lexicon. This very modern building is just in front of the hotel by the harbour. 

The Royal Maritime Hotel

After checking in, I walked around the town which, to be honest, is neither large nor particularly attractive.  To escape the cold, I paid a visit to the National Maritime Museum of Ireland. Housed in an old church it is a collection of maritime artifacts and model ships (some of them in bottles).  It was interesting but, for such a seafaring nation, I found it a bit of an anticlimax. There was a presentation on the torpedoing of the Royal Mail Steamer, the Leinster, just one month before the end of the First World War. Some 501 people died onboard the vessel when it was hit by two torpedoes just outside the Dun Laoghaire harbor.  For the number of fatalities this sinking got very little attention.

The library and the church hosting the National Maritime Museum

Next morning I headed into Dublin again on the DART train.  In the city I decided to take the Hop on Hop Off tour. As I was leaving for Belfast in the mid afternoon, I did not have a lot of time so I did the whole tour without hopping on or hopping off.  I sat the entire time out on the back of an open top double decker bus under blue skies but really windy and cold weather. By the end I was chilled to the bone,

The Customs House

Despite the cold it was a good overview of the city.  We started in O’Connell Street and off we went… the Dublin writer’s museum celebrating the likes of Shaw, Beckett, Swift, Wilde, Joyce and Behan (quite an impressive collection of authors); the impressive General Post Office where the declaration of independence was read;  the Customs House; the very haunting Famine Memorial; the Georgian Merrion Square; the National Gallery; Leinster House, the seat of parliament; Grafton Street; Trinity College and College Green; Dublin City Hall; Christ Church Cathedral; St Patrick's Cathedral; the Guinness Brewery and Storehouse; the Museum of Modern Art; Kilmainham Gaol; Phoenix Park which is the largest urban park in Europe; and finally down the north bank of the Liffey past the Jameson Distillery to our starting point in O’Connell Street.   

Dublin Cathedral

Entrance to the Guinness Brewery

O'Connell's Statue on O'Connell Street

The trip was quite a lot to take in from the top of a bus but it served its purpose of giving me a great overview of the key sites in the city.  It must have been 15 years ago that I was last in Dublin (to run the Dublin Marathon) and I must admit I don't have much of a memory of the city or the marathon course for that matter.  I still will have to come back for a more leisurely look around the place.

The Samuel Beckett Bridge

After the bus trip I walked over to Connolly Station to buy a train ticket to Belfast.  I then had a couple of hours to kill before the train so I walked out to the Liffey and walked up the north side towards the Samuel Beckett Bridge.  This bridge is a modern one designed by Calatrava, the same man that designed the very similar looking Sundial Bridge in Redding, California.

The Famine Memorial

To the west of the bridge is the Famine Memorial which is a haunting group of statues commemorating the Irish Famine of the 1840’s and the departure of so many Irish families for the United States.  Quite moving.

I then had just enough time to visit the Irish Emigration Museum before catching my train.  This museum had apparently won awards for one of the best new museums in Ireland but alas I did not share that view.  It was modern and full of videos and interactive presentations. The trouble with them is that you don’t know when you step into a room showing a video if that is the beginning or middle or end of the presentation.  You have to wait to get oriented and then possibly sit through it again to get the main message. I find that frustrating. As for the interactive displays there are so many of them with so much material that you never know which is the best one and you simply can’t work through each and every one - there’s not enough time.   A thumbs down from me.

I went back to the station and caught my train to Belfast.  A nice modern train and a reasonable price too. Unlike the English trains they don’t penalize you for buying a ticket at the last minute.  The journey up to Belfast takes just over 2 hours and passes along the coast for a while and then inland through some nice countryside. You are totally unaware of when you cross the border to Northern Ireland and I wonder if it will remain the same post Brexit.

Here are some more Dublin photos.