The doors around Merrion Square line up like the paints in a preschooler’s watercolor tray: red and green and blue and pink and yellow and black.
I’m quite intrigued and I can’t figure out why. They are just doors, after all.
The two quick days ahead won’t allow me much time to really get an understanding of Dublin, the complicated, now prosperous Irish capital.
Yet here are these doors, stealing away precious minutes. They do that to visitors, who snap pictures by the roll. Shops sell key chains, postcards, prints, posters, even Christmas tree ornaments, all celebrating them. No other feature of Dublin seems quite so omnipresent. What is it about them?
Frankly, I might have trouble finding my way home here in the Georgian section. Many of the town houses are nearly identical.
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The vividly painted doors set each house apart, of course. But the beauty isn’t in the doors per se. It’s all around them, points out Deirdre Burns, a former schoolteacher and native Dubliner who now helps tourists get a grasp on her city.
“The doors often gave an indication of the status of the house, particularly on Merrion Square, where the aristocracy lived,” Burns said one October morning as we strolled around Merrion Square. Most of the homes belong to businesses now.
Notice the fanlight over the door, she said. The leaded glass design of one might look like simple rays stretching out from the sun, but the one next door more closely resembles the spindles of a ship’s wheel. The sidelights flanking each door are distinct, too.
I knew there was something special about this place. It must have been quite the neighborhood during Dublin’s building boom of the early 18th Century.
Some big names from Dublin’s past are said to have lived here: The poet W.B. Yeats. Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell. The writer Oscar Wilde, who was born in one house and spent some of his adulthood in another.
And Wilde remains, by way of a statue, reclining on a large rock in Merrion Square, across from his home, now part of the American College.
Dublin is a city teeming with activity, block after block, and nearly perfect for exploring on foot.
Midafternoon on a Monday in October, Grafton Street, the city’s main shopping and pedestrian thoroughfare, is almost shoulder to shoulder with businesspeople, shoppers, tourists and street musicians. Tourists pose for pictures with a statue of the mythical fishmonger Molly Malone at the end of the street.
The streets are jammed with cars as well. Traffic has become a real problem, I’m told, because many residents finally have been able to leave the buses behind for their own cars.
Ireland is suddenly prosperous, and the last few years have brought many immigrants — once almost unheard of in Ireland — to Dublin, Burns said.
Tourism is up, too. “Dublin has become a very popular place for weekend trips from the Continent over the last few years,” Burns said.
The Temple Bar neighborhood, she said, is one hot spot. “They even have dancers on standby to teach you to riverdance, believe it or not,” Burns said.
Just a few years ago Temple Bar was a neglected area in the middle of Dublin. Now it’s the bohemian section, known for music and dance clubs, pubs and funky little shops crowded along narrow, cobblestone streets.
Particularly on weekends, the streets and restaurants become packed. Its proximity to Trinity College, just to the east, no doubt explains in part Temple Bar’s popularity with young Dublin.
Trinity, on the other hand, relies on the old to draw visitors. It’s also a place where you can begin to learn about the political and religious history of the city.
Trinity College was founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592 as a Protestant college for men. Even as late as the 1960s, Catholics had to get special permission to attend — or face excommunication.
Trinity’s must-see attraction, indeed one of Dublin’s, is the Book of Kells, an elaborately decorated edition of the four Gospels that dates to the 8th or 9th Century, maybe even earlier. Tradition says the work was finished in the Abbey at Kells, in County Meath. It’s been at Trinity since 1661.
Only two pages — one a page of text from Luke, the other a portrait of St. John — are on display under glass in the college library. These gospels were written on calfskin, using quill pens made from the feathers of swans and geese. The text is impressive, to be sure, but what really struck me was the rich detail of the illustrations. I could have stared at St. John for hours, seeing more and more images and details, some almost daring me to notice them.
Like Trinity, politics and religion compete for attention at many of this city’s attractions. Walk through central Dublin and you’ll notice — well, at least if you have a guide as savvy about Irish history as Burns — that only Protestant churches are on the main thoroughfares. The English, who ruled Ireland for 700 years, wouldn’t allow anything else. Catholics, 90-plus percent of the Irish population — were permitted to build churches only on side streets. Burns points out a Franciscan congregation, the Church of Adam and Eve. Its entrance for many years was through a tavern.
Dublin’s most prominent cathedrals — Christ Church and St. Patrick’s — belong to the Church of Ireland. Both date to the 12th Century.
Catholic or Protestant, the strength of Dublin’s Christian roots is undeniable. St. Patrick himself reportedly baptized 5th Century converts at a well outside where the cathedral now stands. Yet even Ireland’s patron saint is almost overshadowed there by another name: Swift.
Jonathan Swift was the church’s dean from 1713 to 1745. He’s buried in the church nave and celebrated throughout.
Here, he is remembered for “A Sermon on Sleeping in Church,” not that other work, “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Dublin’s most politically charged site may also be the place where it traces its very origins: Dublin Castle.
The castle garden marks the spot where the rivers Liffey and (now underground) Poddle once joined to form a black pool or “Dubhlinn.” The city sprang up around the confluence of these two rivers.
But many Dubliners remember it for something else. “Dublin Castle used to be a place whose name struck great fear into the Irish,” Burns said. It symbolized English rule, was home to the English viceroys and even served as a prison.
King John ordered the building of the castle in 1204. The castle undercroft and its Record Tower remain from those first years, but much of the rest was built over the centuries.
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Dubliners even viewed a statue of justice atop the castle as a sign of England’s disdain. “The woman depicting justice faces in toward the castle, with her back toward Dublin,” Burns said.
Now the castle is Ireland’s own, a place for important state events, such as the inauguration of President Mary McAleese in 1997. On the way back to my hotel, I have to cross through the Georgian section one last time. That’s when I find myself at 29 Lower Fitzwilliam St.
Another townhouse, a gray door this time. But it’s open.
Dublin’s Electricity Supply Board and the National Museum of Ireland have restored this home to the way it must have looked when Olivia Beatty and her family lived in splendor there at the turn of the 19th Century.
Delicate Italian plasterwork decorates the ceiling of the foyer. The house is filled with Chippendale tables, Turkish rugs, a grandfather clock made of sandalwood, huge windows with heavy draperies, oil paintings with gilded frames and beautiful chandeliers. What a life, I think. Then I learn a little more. Beatty was the widow of a wine and paper manufacturer and the mother of three children. I decide she might even be a symbol for Dublin: Prosperous, sure, but her life was obviously more complex than it first seemed. And her story was worth hearing.
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For information: Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., New York, NY 10154; 800-223-6470; www.ireland.travel.ie.
Dublin Tourism, Suffolk Street (just off Grafton Street); 011-353-669792083.
Temple Bar Information Centre, 18 Eustace St.; 01-671-5717.