A Ride on the Dublin Metro

Which Doesn't Actually Exist. On the Underachieving Rail System in Ireland's Capital, and Its Rapidly Improving Bus Network.

// Excuse the radio silence: I've been travelling in the British Isles for the last two weeks, and my agenda was so packed that it didn't leave me time for writing posts. (Really packed: as in, running down platforms, often making my connection with seconds to spare.) The good news is, I was riding buses, trams, and trains, and taking notes along the way, so there will be lots of fodder for Straphanger dispatches in the weeks to come.

I'll start with Dublin. My third time. Each visit has been like touching down in an entirely different city. The first time was the early 1980s: I was but a nipper, and Ireland felt forlorn, poor, and menacing to my impressionable teenaged self. The names of hunger strikers daubed on brick walls, lots of in-your-face poverty, a sense of being in a forlorn but soulful backwater; looking back, I see it through a scrim of what looks like coal dust. (A highlight was talking my parents in letting me go alone to a screening of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. I was walked to an assigned seat by an usher, and the men around me never stopped lighting cigarettes—maybe the scrim I recall was in fact the smoke-fugged projector beam.) The second time was on a book tour, in 2007, I think: full Celtic Tiger phase, everyone complaining about rising housing prices, a feeling of prosperity in the air, lots of Polish workers in the restaurants and hotels. Everything felt shiny, fast-paced, and over-priced.

Now, in 2024, after the bursting of the property bubble and a massive crash—unemployment rose to 14% by 2011—Ireland feels like a place that's righted itself, and got its act together. Particularly in relation to the UK, which is still reeling from Brexit and fourteen years of Conservative mismanagement; there is much Schadenfreude in Ireland about Leaver Brits being forced to wait in long queues at Continental airports, while euro-carrying Irish waltz through Customs. (Dublin is also full of Brazilians—there are loads of shops selling farofa and feijoada—which apparently has something to do with the fact that Brazilian students' visas allow them to work while they're studying.)

All right, enough preamble! I know you've come here for transportation, not local colour. (If you're in any doubt, though, the local colour is a deep forest green.)