And a celebration of the little people with a Swift guide to Dublin.
The little people in question not the fabled leprechauns.
You can find them in the Leprechaun Museum in Jervis Street across the Liffey in north Dublin.
Although they tell us they’re on an adventure until the summer – looking for their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
No, the little people we’re talking about are the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels fame.
Off Pat
If you want a Swift history of Ireland’s other little people then you need to retrace the steps of the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Dr Jonathan Swift.
When Swift wasn’t clericing he was satirising the establishment of his day.
Their pomposity, self-interest and petty squabbling – he’d have even more fun with the politicians of today.
Alas Swift can no longer deliver his rapier wit from his workplace, St Patrick’s Cathedral, off Medieval Dublin on the south of the river.
But he does live on in his writings, the movie of his most famous book, and on the walls of the flats within the vicinity of the church.
While his body rests for eternity at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
A temple of writing
Now most visitors these days won’t travel further than party central, Temple Bar, but if you can carry on down the river.
Then you’ll come across hallowed ground in St Patrick’s Cathedral.
It is here in its gardens they mark the well where the patron saint of Ireland is reputed to have baptised the first Irish Christians.
Now Ireland being affectionately known as the Land of Saints and Scholars its writers too are celebrated within its grounds.
With discs of the likes of Shaw, Joyce, Synge, Beckett, Behan et al built into the walls.
By Jameson Whiskey and the publicans of Dublin.
And for that purple prose and poetry then we naturally follow the recommendations of James Joyce himself.
Or his great character Leopold Bloom, in whose mouth he put these words: ‘Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.’
The Joyce Crawl
Dublin by pub helpfully give us a Joyce pub crawl.
Including Davy Byrne’s where Leopold ate a cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy and the pub off Grafton Street does the same.
If Davy’s is the best-known drinking den for Joyceans it’s not the only one, it’s just the others are known now under other names.
The International, the old Ruggy O’Donoghoe’s, J & M Cleary’s, back then The Signal House, Kennedy’s, the old Conway’s.
As well as The Oval which still carries the old name but was destroyed in the Easter 1916 Rising.
The Fairest City
You can and should, of course, branch out further than the Joyce pubs.
And we did at popular watering hole Sheehan’s, Chatham Street, near Trinity College Dublin.
Before putting our heads down at the always accommodating and comfortable and central Maldron Hotel on Kevin Street.
And then a red eye back to Edinburgh with Ryanair knowing we would be back soon.
And that every visit to Dublin, even after spending 13 years in one of the world’s great cities, brings areas we haven’t explored before.
So with that a Swift guide to Dublin in a long history.
