Dublin

For partiers, the first stop is still Temple Bar, with its winding cobblestone streets and dozens of touristy bars. From there, it’s a short walk to Dame Street, lined with slightly more upmarket restaurants and pubs. This is also where you’ll find the towers of Dublin Castle (+353 1 677 7129, www.dublincastle.ie), once the seat of English colonial power in Ireland. Today, along with a few government offices, the castle houses the amazing (and free) Chester Beatty Library (+353 1 407 0750, www.cbl.ie, closed Mon Oct-Apr), which holds a collection of ancient art and hundreds of illuminated manuscripts.

Heading west, Dame Street becomes College Green, leading to Trinity College, alma mater to Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Jonathan Swift. Trinity’s 16th-century campus makes for a pleasant stroll, and its Old Library (+353 1 608 1661, www.icd.ie/library) holds the most famous book in Ireland: a medieval illuminated gospel known as the Book of Kells. From here you are within striking distance of Grafton Street, jammed with tourists, artists and buskers.

The other end of Dame Street is the city’s church zone. First are the whitewashed walls of Christ Church Cathedral (Christchurch Place, +353 1 677 8099, www.cccdub.ie), founded in 600 by Strongbow, the first conqueror of Ireland. A few blocks away, St Patrick’s (St Patrick’s Close, +353 1 453 9371, www.stpatrickscathedral.ie) has a glorious nave.

Head further west and you’ll find the ‘Church of Guinness’ (Guinness Storehouse, St James’s Gate, +353 1 408 4800, www.guinness-storehouse.com), where a hefty €14 entry fee buys two hours of black-stuff madness and a trip to the Gravity Bar. Across the river in the northern half of Dublin, make your way to busy O’Connell Street, and up to the city’s most political monument – the General Post Office. On Easter Day 1916 Patrick Pearse stood on its steps to read a proclamation declaring a free Irish Republic. You can still put your fingertips into the bullet holes that riddle the columns and the façade.

At the top of O’Connell Street, Parnell Square holds the absorbing Dublin Writers’ Museum (18 Parnell Square, +353 1 872 2077, www.writersmuseum.com), with letters, notes and personal items from the likes of Brendan Behan, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce.

Local history

Dublin, a once and now again proud capital, has had to put up with its fair share of political impotence over the years. Outsiders, from the Vikings to the meddling English kings of the Middle Ages, and, ultimately the 1801 Act of Union, sought to wield influence over the country. But, the city survived to become a beacon of cultural civility in the 18th century, a heyday it is reliving with gusto again in the 21st.

Local politics

Ireland has a strong and affectionate relationship with the US, where almost every family in the country has relatives, and which has been the source of much of the country’s wealth – first via the tourism industry, and later the influx of big business. Many Irish attitudes – cultural, economic, even architectural – are far more akin to US thinking than to that of Europe; there are even those who seriously propose that Ireland should become the ‘51st State’.