‘I can only think of one place in the entire city that right now really feels like it’s serving Dublin. And it’s the library’
I have a confession to make. Sometimes, I don’t think that hotels are menacing threats to the social fabric of Dublin. Sometimes, I think they’re just hotels. And though I understand it to be a major concern for others, I often struggle to make myself care about how many places there are in the city for “people to dance”.
And I am sometimes unmoved when I read eulogies for a trendy restaurant most people have never heard of, the closure of which is being mourned as though Joyce had written about visiting it for vegan burgers in Ulysses. It seems that even businesses that are the product of nothing other than accelerated gentrification can become monuments to Authentic Dublin, God rest its soul, if their closure annoys enough people in Stoneybatter.
