Day 6

 

Day 6 - Dublin

We started the day with a bus tour of Dublin.  There was an all women’s marathon scheduled for today so many streets were closed.  The bus tour was not great.  After that we went to the National Gallery.  Impressive. We mostly looked at Irish art because we knew very little about it. A few pieces stood out – a 1951 painting called A Family by   Louis le Brocquy, some paintings by John Yeats, brother of William Butler Yeats, and most of all the exquisite stain glass works by Harry Clarke from the early 1900s.  Then we walked along St. Stephen’s Green to the Museum of Irish Literature.  It is a very interesting place, and the way the “displayed” literature is beautiful. It’s both visual – with large panels with information and quotations and also auditory – pieces of literature in both English and Irish are being read.  In one room, there is a large display of lines from Joyce’s Ulysses, and in front of it, in the middle of the room there are 4 tables with quotations, each on a different theme. Each table has 4 quotes from different writers, and as you approach, these quotes are being read to you. If you like any of them, you can tear off a page with this particular one  (there are stacks) and take it with you. Lovely idea. Most of the exhibition is about Joyce, but there is information about many Irish writers, both past and contemporary, and they are constantly adding new ones. At the top floor, there is a display of the first copy of Ulysses, and an opportunity for visitors to add their  writing to a big display board.   From there we walked to the Dublin Castle. It’s large and imposing, and it has a lovely round garden behind it and former stables, now an exhibition space. We briefly visited a good exhibition about the history of independent Ireland, called Society and State. One of the surprising facts we learned was that 1 in 5 people living in Ireland now was born outside Ireland, compared to 1 in 8 in the US so Ireland is more diverse than the US. Another surprising fact that the second language most spoken in Dublin (after English) is Polish because many Polish people settled here in the early 2000s after Poland was accepted to the EU. The Irish language (they don’t call it Gaelic here) is only spoken by about 11% of the population, more in the west of Ireland than in the east.  Since many roads were closed, we opted for a taxi back to hotel, which took us through the areas we have not seen before.










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