THIS IS CLOSER to heaven than I’ve been in a while. On a brilliant, freezing day in Dublin, I’m sitting in the Gravity Bar atop the Guinness Storehouse (part of the old brewery, now an imaginative visitor centre) drinking my first pint of the black stuff — and a free one, too, served with a shamrock carved in its foam.

The circular glass bar is styled to represent (from outside) the creamy head on Ireland’s most famous export. I can’t imagine any other place where a brewery would emblazon literary quotations all around on the vast windows, so you gaze at the panoramic view of this most beautiful of cities through the floating words of another great export, James Joyce. I’m sipping contentedly, oblivious to the happy drinkers, dipping into Dubliners and Patrick Kavanagh from time to time. And it’s all going down so well — since liquor and literature are twin sides of Ireland’s soul, as well as the thriving tourist trade of its capital.

Though this is the land of my fathers, I have no real knowledge of Dublin. In 1967 I slept one night in the YWCA, after the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. In 1972 I came for two nights to a depressed city, for a newspaper story about IRA funds from America, and went under cover to a republican bar which cheered when the TV announced British soldiers had been blown up in Belfast. In 1984 I flew in for a day to interview Seamus Heaney for The Times. But today’s Dublin is enjoying the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom and is a favourite destination for stag and hen nights.

Modern Dublin is epitomised by the slick style of the Morrison Hotel. Out there in traditional pubs they’re still singing republican songs, but the lobbies of the Morrison are darkly fashionable, its clientele prosperous. The Georgian Merrion Hotel is ultra-elegant, the Clarence lent extra glamour because of U2 ownership — but the Morrison is younger and funkier. However, we were in one of the large, new studio rooms, and what do you know? All style over comfort. Who decided that a vast, glacially chic bathroom didn’t merit even a heated towel-rail or decent shower-head, that there should be no drawer or reachable shelf to stash your smalls, poor lighting, no dressing table, and no desk light for those of us who need to work?

Hotels do not a city make, when marvels like The Book of Kells await. The first sight of the graceful buildings and spaces of Trinity College made me wish I’d studied there. Students who pass under the bell tower are said to fail their exams, so it was pleasant to stand there knowing I would never have to take another exam in my life. But to be tested on the exemplary exhibition, Turning Darkness into Light, would be a pleasure. This sets The Book of Kells and other Irish illuminated manuscripts in context, before you move through with awe to the thing itself — the miraculous survivor from about AD800. It would be worth hopping over to Dublin just for a day to see Trinity College and its most precious possession, and to walk along the Liffey in the pink of a winter afternoon.

There are many ways of approaching Dublin — museums (of course), shopping in Grafton Street, a pub crawl in buzzy Temple Bar, fine dining. Grafton Street, thronged for Christmas, disappointed me by being too full of predictable chain shops, and so I fell with delight on the eclectic wonders of Wicklow-based Avoca in Suffolk Street (wonderful clothes, accessories, food, throws and cushions, children’s stuff) and some of the national outlets, such as Kilkenny, in Nassau Street. When in Ireland, try to buy Irish, for what’s the point of going to Habitat? Mind you, what must be the most classy Topshop in the West, the new one on St Stephen’s Green, has made a point of showcasing some Irish designers.

“Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green . . .” wrote Joyce, and literature is my own path into Dublin. What quirk of sociohistorical chemistry produced so many writers in Ireland? We made a pilgrimage to the Henry Moore tribute to Yeats, tucked in a corner of the Green. Characteristically, the bust of Joyce not far away gazes with a gimlet eye on the city he so disliked.

You can go to see Oscar Wilde’s house and the monument to Jonathan Swift in St Patrick’s Cathedral — or wrap them all up in one by spending half a day in the Writers’ Museum in a Georgian mansion in Parnell Square. Fascinating though this is, the displays need updating — there should, for example, be much more than a bronze bust of the Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney.

I thought a Monday-to- Friday visit gave plenty of time, but you can’t stay on your feet for ever — and a day when we saw Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Castle and its brilliant Chester Beatty Library, followed by the National Gallery (the Yeats family pictures and so much more) was all but too much. The Ulysses exhibition at the National Library is the most brilliantly conceived and executed literary show I have seen, the Museum of Ireland is unmissable . . . and by Thursday I knew I’d fallen in love with this city of my blood.

On the final night we brought the two sides of Dublin together on a literary pub crawl. Upstairs, in the Duke pub, off Grafton Street, 25 people from Australia, the US, Scandinavia and England gathered to hear the actors Derek Reid and Eithne Dempsey do their stuff on literature and liquor, then segue into an extract from Waiting For Godot.

Later, in the smart club Lillie’s Bordello, mixed music thudded for a mixed group of people: all sequins and trainers. A British guy who looked about 20 was ordering champagne at £60 a bottle. Dublin’s nightlife wasn’t for me. So we walked back past Molly Malone’s buxom statue, through Temple Bar and over the Ha’penny Bridge, pausing to look down into the freezing water of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” — the memory of Eithne’s voice enough to drown the distant shouts of drunks.



Need to know

Bel Mooney flew from Bristol to Dublin with Ryanair , which flies to Dublin from 17 regional airports in the UK. Returns from £19.98. She stayed at the Morrison Hotel, where double rooms cost from £98 a night.

Reading: Dublin (Time Out, £11.99).

Further information: www.tourismireland.com, www.visitdublin.com.

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