The Dublin Community Blog

Descending as I do, despite a cultivated patrician air and sophisticated epicurean mien, from a long line of rangy mountain farmers, horny-handed and racy of North Kerry’s blanket bogs, I am no stranger to the enthusiasm for a long oul’ walk in the open spaces of the world. On the cusp of 80 years, my grandfather was wont to come north from the misty fastness of Faha Dubh (the Black Wilderness) to visit our chocolate box village by the meandering Shannon and kick along mile after mile of bucolic country lane with his bow-legged lope. Ar dheis Dé go raith a anam dílis.

Suffice it to say, the yen for a wander persists in the Copernican veins. With Bloomsday looming, one is reminded by the peregrinations of Leopold and Stephen that Dublin is just the place to stretch the legs on a fine summer’s evening. As the weather continues passing fair, if not quite so hot, the Dublin Community Blog has a great tip for those who fancy a bit of a turn about the boulevards of the fair city.

Walking Dublin by Paddy Liddy sets out 24 walks which vary in length from a mere 2 mile saunter a la mode du flâneur round historic city-centre sites, certain fashionable precincts and honest-to-goodness cobbled thoroghfares to a somewhat more substantial 8 mile canter about the hill of Howth. My own well-thumbed copy has proved both the impetus and essential companion for several of the most enjoyable days on which I’ve roved out, my wonders to perform, on either side of the Liffey. For the Joyceans among you, it even includes a Ulysses walk, though this frankly should not be attempted sans straw boater and ivory-tipped cane.

One of the Globetrotter series of guides, the charming and companionable Walking Dublin contains everything you need to put a bit of shape on your rambles including, but not limited to details of public transport access to the start and finishing points of each walk, a map of the route, blow-by-blow directions way-marked by points of local and historic interest, walking distance, a generous estimate of the likely time the walk will take and, of no mean importance, the particulars of those hostelries and places of public resort in which the weary traveller may seek a restorative libation (that’s a pint of the black stuff to you or me) and a bite to eat – be it crubeen, tripe or a packet of cheese and onion Taytos.

There has always been a great tradition of walking in Dublin. Not so long ago I read that, as a boy, Flann O’Brien (whose book At-Swim-Two-Birds we’re all supposed to be reading right now) would set forth of a Sunday with his father from their home by the canal just off Leeson Street and walk out of town into the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Mr. Liddy recommends the same and will take the more vigorous of you from the suburbs through creepy Hell Fire Wood to see the even creepier Hell Fire Club which stands to this day in mute, bleak monument to the depravity of those eighteenth century ascendancy bucks who put their mortal souls to the hazard; dabbling in the black arts in their meddlesome preoccupation with peering behind the thin veil that separates the material world from the wierd esoterica of the great beyond.

I’ve used Walking Dublin to find my way from Rathfarnham to Ballsbridge along the tranquil Dodder – a lovely walk – and to inform a wonderful stroll along the coast from Blackrock to Sandycove, my backpack well stocked with picnic wine, baguette and brie from the local Superquinn. And cake.

With Walking Dublin as your constant companion, you’ll soon have enjoyed little-known Dublin treats – visiting the preserved chamber of the House of Lords by ducking into the Bank of Ireland from the portico on Westmoreland Street or whizzing by the Hut in Phibsboro on your bicycle and admiring your upside-down reflection in the curious old mirror built into its façade.

Walking Dublin is available in any daycent buke shop or online.

I realise it can be difficult to find something to do in Dublin on a Saturday night which doesn’t involve rubbing shoulders with people in short-sleeved Ben Sherman shirts who, having just seen their bird get off with a trainee garda in one of the capital’s more salubrious niteclubs, are stomping around the city centre looking for someone with spectacles and a bony nerdlike frame to punch in the face.

Well have I got news for you! Fresh from their triumph as winners of the coveted Artist of the Week accolade on Tom Dunne’s Pet Sounds, The Brad Pitt Light Orchestra bring their gentle, witty, melodic but still quite rocking sensibility, understated good looks and leather-jacket cool to Slattery’s on Capel Street TONIGHT.

The BPLO are led by none other than David Blake Esq, who hardcore Dublin scene merchants will recognise from his regular stints at David McWilliams’ Leviathan political cabaret. David (Blake that is, not McWilliams) is one half of Leviathan’s dynamic White Cholera duo along with Eanna Hickey of The Carnival Saloon.

David has been producing textured, accessible but mathematically intriguing patterns of melody in his bedroom for some years now and polished them to the degree of shiny perfection which makes them ready for mass consumption. David was very good at languages in school (he won a Spanish prize and was pictured in the local press) and his lyrical wordsmithying continues reflect this facility. If you’re still unsure, you can listen to the BPLO’s Fireside Chat EP here as you carry on browsing around the rest of the Interwebs. Also available at the link is the BPLO version of The Sugababes’ Hole in the Head which featured on The Ray D’Arcy Show covers album, Even Better Than The Real Thing.

If, like me, you’d like the opportunity to listen to good music surrounded by good-natured people while enjoying creamy pints and middle-brow conversational stylings, doors are at 8 p.m. and admission is a mere €8. As the band points out on their site, this is the price of a Mars bar in Dublin.

And I guarantee you won’t get beaten up.

I’m delighted to inaugurate my membership of the Dublin Community Blog as one who, despite being up from what many jackeens conceive amorphously as “down the country”, is very fond of our nation’s capital. So many great bars to prop up, bookshops to spend hours in, eateries to grow fat in, galleries and museums to stroke one’s beard in. And all the best bands come here.

In order to get my foot on the property ladder, I have had to leave the southside where I was formerly wont to make my lair and come north to take up residence in the vicinity of the national cemetery. And it is here I have encountered the 40 bus service. It was never like this on the southside kids.

The 40 runs along a QBC – quality bus corridor – which is capable of delivering your humble narrator to O’Connell Street in about 15 minutes on a good day, and it would be great were it not for one or two little problems. The first of these is capacity and the second is the weird timetabling issue which means that during certain times of the day, the buses seem to enter the Twilight Zone. I have rather, ahem, flexible working hours, but according to my girlfriend only one 40 goes to Stephen’s Green in the morning, that is to say is cross-town, which sucks, especially as, by the time it gets down to where we are, it is choc full of commuters from Finglas and simply wafts past on a noxious cloud of diesel fumes. Hundreds of apartments are being built and occupied along the N2, but the service hasn’t remotely caught up. Perhaps it hasn’t changed at all. Frustrated workgoers can watch three buses pass them full after 7.45 a.m. and not catch one until well after eight.

At other times of the day, one can get to the bus stop and read on the timetable that the next bus will supposedly have begun its journey 15 minutes ago and be due to arrive in five – the journey time this stop being 20 minutes. But it doesn’t show. Over 25 minutes later, the next bus comes. Why does one leave early and the other late? Beats me. After this massive, frustrating hiatus in the service, it is a regular occurence to be passed by a full bus (surprise, surprise, the passengers built up at the stops) whereupon three more come along in convoy. The last two will be completely empty for the trip to town. Why weren’t they staggered? What are the drivers up to at their terminus?

I often wander to the nearby 19 and 83 services instead which run in a much more clockwork fashion, not least, I suspect, because they’re on their way to the southern ‘burbs. While a lot of the drivers on the 40 route seem quite sound and friendly, others are appalling. They drive like lunatics and in a rough and jerky manner. I have never heard a driver address a passenger in Rathmines, Ranelagh or Ballsbridge the way I’ve heard them speak to some over here. I had a right hop off a particularly ill-favoured fellow one day for the outrageous disrespect he showed to an elderly woman. What a prick. Perhaps people on the northside don’t deserve the same level of respect and customer service as those in the even numbered post codes.

But back to the capacity issue. For the Celtic Tygger has penetrated even unto Finglas and its ambitious, restive population needs buses in great numbers to get them to and from their places of employment. While it is in no way reflective of the range of occupations which Finglasians undertake in this great metropolis of ours, there is a graffito on one of the vehicles regularly servicing the 40 route demonstrating how the basic tenets of free market liberalism to which Irishmen and women now hold dear have not been lost on the young people on the city’s north western marches. This graffito takes the form of an equation which states simply and with economic elegance:

hard work + happy customers = €uros

It’s accompanied by a picture of a stick man smoking a fat, chronic blunt.

Diligent economic actors need more buses, but I won’t hold my breath. The Minister for Transport has said the bus capacity in Dublin is to be increased by 60% and that it is hoped this expansion in service will be achieved through private sector investment. Bring it on say I. Perhaps a bit of competition will focus the minds of the worst elements on the 40 and other benighted routes. However, the Minister appears to be refering to the opening of new routes. Dublin Bus will continue to service their existing routes exclusively rather than to face competition along them.

I’m saving up to buy a push bike.

Bonus Link for bus anoraks – The All About Buses dot Com Forums