From ten or eleven years ago - on Politics.ie, this one by The Mowl.
The positives and negatives of life in Dublin, and how you rate your capital city.
The Mowl said:
Positives: The distance from here to there.
Negatives: It's a filthy run-down kip, a dive full of thieving knackers, scumbags, rip-off bars and clubs, junkies everywhere you look, shÃt quality restaurants, dirt and filth everywhere you go, lousy public transport, minimal amenities, and blatantly cheating taxi drivers.
And that's just the average fúcking tourist's first three hours in the shÃthole after landing.
I was born there, grew up there, educated there, and spent most of my young adulthood working and saving to get myself the hell out of the place as soon and as often as I possibly could. All of my family followed this same path, and we are now flung to the four corners of the planet, happy in our lives, comfortable amongst our new cultures, successful in our relationships and careers, and dreading every visit home to see the remaining elderly members of our family for months before we arrive.
The further away from the place I've gotten, the better I've felt. The less I think of the place, the less depressed I feel. The more often I come back for work, the more I resent being there at all. The longer I spend there, the more I wish I was anywhere else.
Services are of the shÃte and ham-fisted level. Crappy staff in the dirty bars and lounges, heavy-handed doormen at most bars and clubs, fake exclusivity and cheap glamour everywhere you look, ugly fat women in dresses too far short and far too tight to cause them no less than maximum embarrassment and me no less than the most vomitous reaction. Loudmouth Dubliner morons wall to wall in the bars, Dublin blokes are amongst the least interesting people I've ever met anywhere in the world. Even worse when they're drunk. The women are repulsive in every possible way. Horrible, cheap, knackery accents, no style, no grace, no feminity, no womanliness at all about them. Instead they're mean, greedy, shallow, domineering, loud, vacuous, and vain without any foundation whatsoever.
The one place in the world where you're guaranteed dirty looks and sneers from utter scumbags hanging around wasting their miserable, empty lives. Dole scroungers and dope-dealers. Rip-offs and street traders selling stolen or fake goods everywhere from street corners to the toilets of the pubs. The toilets of the pubs? The most pÃss-stinking, rancid hell-holes anywhere in the northern hemisphere.
Rotten, over-priced beer in pÃss and bleach smelling bars, served up by white-shirted ignoramuses posing as qualified bar staff, while the Asians and Eastern Europeans teach them something about servicing customers in a reasonably polite and respectful manner. Having worked as a contractor in may of the restaurant's service areas and kitchens over the years, I wouldn't eat in any of them. Not one. They're vile. I'd trust any fish & chip joint who cook a supper in front of me far sooner than any one star, massively over-priced and unbearably pretentious restaurant.
The architecture is horrific. The grid is a spaghetti mountain of utter chaos. I've wasted more time waiting for buses than riding them. The public transport drivers are, to the man, utterly horrible people. Rude, dismissive, unhelpful, and extremely ignorant. The rip-off with exact change and no coin returns on the buses is just another in-your-face petty thieving ruse. It's simply one of the worst planned cities anywhere on the continent of Europe for traffic, parking, clamping, getting your bike stolen, or smashed up if they can't steal it.
The ticketing system for our sad excuse for a public transport system couldn't be more chaotic if you'd sat a team of rabid chimpanzees down to sort it out with crayons and sheets of A6 cartridge paper.
O'Connell Street is simply the ugliest and most harrowing of main streets anywhere in Europe to stroll down. Tacky shopfronts and plastic everywhere you look. Traditional Irish craft stores, like O'Carrolls, with their leprechaun uniforms, kiss-me-quick hats and tri-colours making the place look like a vomit bucket. The stink of stale pÃss everywhere you go, and not a single public toilet anywhere. Had to lock them up and shut them down to stop the kiddie-fiddlers hanging around them willie-spotting and gloryholing. You couldn't script a kip as horrific, unless you were trying to compare it to the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Bums, homeless people, muggers, chancers, rip-off merchants a-plenty.
Any tourist who's ever asked me about Dublin and mentioned their intentions to visit always get the exact same advice from me. Take the fastest bus from the airport to the nearest train station and go as far west as you can go as quickly as you can get there. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred euro. Run as fast as you can everywhere you go. Do not speak to anybody who approaches you in the streets, for any reason. Never carry anything of any value on your person. Keep your camera and mobile phones on straps attached to your wrists. Keep your money, travellers cheques or credit cards down your pants next to the goolies. Do not hand strangers your camera and ask them to take a photo of you in front of The Temple Bar pub with your wife, girlfriend, husband, lover, fiancé or fiancée, pet pig or goat. Leave nothing of any value at all in your hotel room after you go out. Trust no-one. Keep your wits about you at all times, morning and night. Don't even trust the Gardái, they're amongst the worst cúnts you'll meet anywhere in Ireland.
Stay away from Temple Bar, stay far away from Grafton Street, from Smithfield, and especially from O'Connell Street and it general environs. Do not, for any reason, board the Red Line of the Luas. Only visit Henry Street and Talbot Street if your boxers and knickers have been stolen by your hotel room cleaning crew, and it's an absolute emergency where you need freshies. Don't think for even a moment that it's a lovely idea to head out for a picnic in the Phoenix Park in the afternoons. Unless you go armed to the teeth.
Notify persons of kin before leaving your hotel room at all, and try not to be too negatively affected by the mundane horrors you see everywhere around you. Don't attempt to give money to Roma people, junkies, pitiful, broken-down homeless guys who whimper and moan as though they're close to death but remain incapable of helping themselves up off the ground to fetch the coins that spilled from their paper cup.
Stay well away from the suburbs.
No-go areas include Tallaght, Ballyfermot, Seán Mc Dermott street, Sheriff Street, Fatima Mansions, Clondalkin, Esker, Clonee, Inchicore, Blanchardstown, the East Wall, the North Wall, the northside in general, all of the southside, the bits in the middle, the bits out around the edges, the very epicentre, in fact, the whole fúcking thing.
Just stay away from it altogether, and if you can't just kill yourself now.
It's just not worth it.
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The US Embassy in Ireland issued the warning after a US tourist was last week assaulted on Dublin’s Talbot Street.
www.thejournal.ie