Dub23 day 2

Ireland 2023 - Day 2 - Dublin destinations

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On Saturday morning I was up at 5 am, having slept well. I got coffee in the lobby and enjoyed looking at Dublin maps. It was pleasing to be up so early in a still-sleeping City.

At 7 am, the hotel had a nicely arranged self-serve breakfast array, well-attended. It remained dark outside until 8 am.

On a cold & windy morning, I walked north for 20 minutes, to Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where I had a quiet self-guided tour about 10 am. The original church was built in 1191.

In 1254, St, Patrick's Cathedral came about through renovation & expansion, modernized to (early) English Gothic style. It is a Church of Ireland Cathedral, unified with the (Anglican) Church of England, and Protestants & Catholics are not welcome.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, was also an Anglican Minister, with an Oxford Divinity Degree, later appointed Dean of St. Patrick's by English Queen Anne, and he remained in that post for 32 years.

Dean Swift was known for kindness & services to the local poor, and, he left his entire legacy of 12,000 pounds to help fund a mental institution (equal to $815,000 today).

St. Patrick's Cathedral			1,000 year old slab		first look at interior
	Jonathan Swift grave site, buried next to...		...his longtime partner, Stella, see note.		Trinity College graduate (web photo)
		Choir stalls & Altar		where evensong is sung most days
	Dean Swift, 1740, by Francis Bindon (web photo)		Biblical lessons in the glass		himself (St, Pat)
the park behind the Cathedral		St. Pat's Cathedral (web photo)

note - the story about Stella can be found on the Bibliography page.

At St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dean Swift was property manager, director of church services, and the HR Dept. At a time when 20 pounds a year was a decent salary, he oversaw an annual budget of 10,000 pounds & over the years demonstrated competent managerial abilities, reporting directly to the Archbishop of Ireland, who like Swift lived near the Cathedral.

Dean Swift as an Anglican Minister held Sunday services and gave a monthly sermon, supposedly well-attended.

Jonathan Swift the author was a complicated man, outspoken & secretive, and Gulliver's Travels, like most of his works, was published using a pseudonym. Everyone recognized his style and knew he did this to avoid legal troubles in London.

When it came to Irish issues, it was Swift's anti-Parliament stance (in his widely published & read Treatises) which over time made him a hero to the Irish people. And in his last two decades, his birthday was celebrated City-wide, with time off from work, evening bonfires, as well as food & ale for the public, provided by the Cathedral.

(Swift ref. info - see bibliography page - link is above).

River Liffey seemed attractive at first, but on each side there's a three-lane (one way) thoroughfares, and cars & tour buses are constant, as are diesel fumes. I only walked along the river for 4 blocks & headed southeast.

looking east

two river travelers

National Gallery - this took some time to find, but it was good to be out & walking around the City. The Fodors guide says a person could walk across the entire City, from almost any point, in 45 minutes.

I enjoyed spending a few hours at the art museum, and it was pleasantly uncrowded. There was a good display of Irish painters downstairs and upstairs are European standards, in spacious rooms.

see note				Liffey Swim, see note
	European paintings		Vermeer, 1670
Rembrandt, 1632		the undisputed master of the face & eyes (note tiny pearl ear rings).

note - Ireland's best known painter, Jack Butler Yates, was the younger brother of poet William Butler Yates, who won the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature (more on him near the end of the trip).

One year later, Jack Yates submitted the above painting (Liffey Swim) and won an Olympic Silver Medal in Paris in 1924, in the Arts & Culture category. Jack's artistic style changed a few times and the first room in the Irish painters Wing was full of his works. I found his later works too dark & abstract.

After two hours, I had seen most of the collection, and had read a lot, and I felt tired. The Museum has a good cafe, with a glass ceiling maybe 100 ft. above, where two buildings (one old and one new) collide at right angles. I was refreshed by the architecture & brightly-lit space and of course by a scone with butter & jam and an Americano.

Later in the museum gift shop I purchased a book written by a retired Dublin (Criminal) Superior Court Judge, Gillian Hussey. It turned out to be a great read; more on the book, later.

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Postscript - On Saturday evening I dined again at Iveagh Garden Hotel, and then read for a few hours, or wrote in the journal. My wife and I realized that we would overlap for a short time, morning and night, and we kept up to date with text messages. (At the time, we had an older male cat, seemingly in decline, who instead made a nice recovery.)

I tried to stay up late (like 11 pm?) and around 9 pm I started hearing shouts from somewhere nearby, in the neighborhood. I asked the front desk person if there was a concert going on, and he said "Those are the local pubs, watching a Rugby game, and they yell when the home team scores". He added "if you go outside you'll hear every pub in Dublin shouting, all at once, when someone scores." I went outside on Harcourt long enough to discover that it was really cold, and deserted.

What he didn't tell me was that Ireland was (just then) playing New Zealand in a World Cup Quarter-final Rugby match. I'm not a rugby fan, but WC status makes it important, and, it was a close game, with NZ prevailing in the end, I learned later. The game was not being played in Ireland, and, it was the first time Ireland had advanced so far into WC playoffs.

I fell asleep at 10:30 pm and was woken up about 1:30 am, by some angry people outside, yelling & banging on the vertical pipes that delineate the bike lanes. A small & unorganized group was moving south, no doubt coming from Temple Bar, to the north. For a few moments it was bizarre, but I had a portable room fan going (for white noise) and closed the vent window, and everything was fine.

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