June 3, 2025

Dateline – Dublin, Ireland

I apologize for not writing last evening but I was tired and yesterday and today are more or less the same day in regards to travel, just separated by a sleep period. All of the organized stuff was finished. Just me here in Dublin for two days with no specific agenda, a two day Hop on Hop off buss pass if I didn’t feel like walking (and Dublin isn’t all that big so I did walk for the most part – me and the River Liffey became good friends), and lists of things sent from various sources for things to see and do while here. My pedometer is happy. I feel like I caught most of the highlights (but deliberately skipped a few things like the Guiness Tour – I’m not a huge fan of beer). Now I get a decent night’s sleep before getting up around midnight Birmingham time for the roughly 16 hour process of returning home. Apparently Ireland has a most favored nations clause of some sort that allows us to clear immigration here rather than in Atlanta so it’s supposed to be a bit easier. It also explains why there are 10-15,000 undocumented Irish in the USA I suppose. Haven’t seen a single report of ICE interfering with them. I wonder why…

So, a few of the stops and some impressions of Dublin. First, it’s a fairly flat city as it’s built along a number of tidal rivers making walking easy. Second, there are very few large buildings and nothing that would qualify as a skyscraper. I think the tallest I saw were about fifteen floors. Ireland has been a poor country for centuries with its wealth expropriated and exported until relatively recently. It’s time with the EU seems to have turned things around. Prices in Dublin are no longer cheap and real estate throughout the country seems to be zooming up and out of reach of the younger generation which makes me think the young uns will again become Ireland’s most valuable export over the last few centuries, her people.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral – like most medieval Irish architecture more blocky and Romanesque than the soaring Gothic of France or the Perpendicular of England. Still splendid in its own way.

Temple Bar – like any entertainment district anywhere filled with pubs, restaurants, bars, tourist shops, and people determined to have a good time. Some of the winding side streets have some hidden treasures but you[ve seen plenty of places like this before.

Trinity College – Interesting mix of Jacobean and Modern built around a classical quadrangle. Lots of history. The Book of Kells, one of the great antiquities is housed here. It’s not the largest thing and it would be difficult to display multiple pages but I’m really not sure why they had to turn it into an hour long son et lumiere ‘experience’ full of bad animation. I’d rather stay home and watch the Irish film, The Secret of Kells, which is full of good animation. (This whole interactive immersive trend with art puzzles me in general).

The Irish National Gallery – A middling collection of minor old masters. Some very good Irish painting, especially a collection of Jack Butler Yeats (William’s brother – their father was a celebtrated portraitist and there is some of his work as well). The Irish National Portrait Gallery is appended. I especially liked the modern stuff from the last fifty or so years of people whom I know from news and culture.

The General Post Office Museum – A multimedia interactive display of the events around the rising of 1916 and the partiton and civil war of the early 1920s. It’s in the actual GPO building which was the center of the 1916 action. I liked this one a lot and would like to see it expanded. There’s so much more to tell about modern Irish history. I knew the bare bones (mainly gleaned from BBC series or historical novels of the Edwardians and World War I as it’s often in the background) but have learned a good deal more this past week. I’ll need to do some additional reading. If anyone has recommendations, let me know.

The EPIC Museum – a museum dedicated to the Irish diaspora and how Irish individuals and culture have traveled the world and influenced so much in so many places. Again, very interactive and multimedia and laid out through a series of basement vaults under an old 19th century indoor marketplace. A good one to bring the kids.

Not an exhaustive list of everything, but a few highlights. I’m glad I made the trip. I feel like I’ve seen a good deal of the country over the last ten days and have a feel for what it’s like, it’s history, and how it fits into the current world puzzle. Still planning a fall trip in my usual late October slot but haven’t figured out what or where yet. Plenty of time. I’m thinking something slower paced – perhaps with a beach involved.

Looking over the news from the states, Trump issues an executive order on Friday regarding science and scientific research. Perusing it, it more or less states that political appointees can and should censor scientific findings incompatible with poltiical goals and that scientists who publish findings unfavorable to ideology can and should be punished by executive branch officers. This sort of thing has been done before – particularly in Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China and the results tended to be rather disastrous leading to millions of deaths from starvation due to failed crops and the like. History is unlikely to repeat but it does rhyme so expect some sort of major disaster with serious consequences for millions of us when politics trumps science because science and the natural world don’t care who runs the White House. The most likely thing is another pandemic which is significantly worse than Covid and which spreads much more easily as we have destroyed containment mechanisms. But then again, we have a head of FEMA who doesn’t know that we have a hurricane season, NOAA and the NWS are in tatters, and the administration is planning on 40% plus cuts in science research across the board which is going to have huge ripple effects through academia and any town home to a medical school or university with strong science programs. One piece of good news, Trump and Elon are on the outs with Elon offering a scathing read on the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. That didn’t take long…

And I don’t want to hear any ‘that’s not what we voted for’ – it’s exactly what you voted for. All the information was there with what the administration’s plans were long before the election. I can’t help it if you didn’t do the reading.