Most years I get the opportunity to go to Dublin on business and it’s a place I’ve grown very fond of. Not sure I’d want to live there: financial crisis aside, the city has some serious structural faults that I’m sure test the resolve of even the most patient residents. The lack of a rail link to the airport seems bizarre, and the subsequent reliance on the roads is compromised by the endemic bottlenecks. The whole city seems to exist in a state of perpetual gridlock.
On the plus side, the Dart is the epitome of a civilized urban transport system, and I also particularly like the technoid bleeps and rimshots made by the pedestrian crossings. The people, of course, are lovely…

This year I explored the newly-developed area down toward the Grand Canal Docks: here are a few images (iPhone 4S).

The new Convention Centre and the Beckett Bridge seen from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. In the background, and below, evidence of the financial crisis is all too visible:

All the way down City Quay and along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay there’s plenty of slick post-modernist architecture, mostly housing financial institution:

…which ends abruptly as you reach where the Liffey, Dodder, and the Grand Canal meet. The graffiti-strewn wasteland at the point is the site of a proposed bridge across to York Road, much needed but apparently a victim of the Recession:

After circling back via Hanover Quay – did I really walk past U2’s studio? – we’re back into the high-PoMo island of Grand Canal Square:

Which brings us back onto Pearse Street and directly back to the hotel: