Travel and Tourism in Ireland

Merrion Square and the Georgian City

The south side of central Dublin is defined by its Georgian architecture, the legacy of the eighteenth century when Dublin, as the capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, was among the largest and most prosperous cities in the British Isles. The Georgian squares — Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square, St Stephen's Green — are compositions of remarkable consistency and elegance, their brick terraces with their distinctive painted doors and elaborate fanlights creating an urban environment of considerable formal beauty.

Merrion Square is the finest of these spaces. Oscar Wilde lived at Number One as a child — his parents, the surgeon William Wilde and the nationalist poet known as Speranza, maintained one of the most brilliant literary salons in Victorian Dublin — and the park in the center of the square contains a reclining statue of Wilde by sculptor Danny Osborne that captures something of the writer's languid, ironical character. The colorful doorways of Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square have become one of Dublin's most photographed subjects, their individual combinations of color and design giving each house a distinct personality within the overall harmony of the streetscape.

The Aran Islands

The three Aran Islands — Inis Mor, Inis Meain, and Inis Oirr — lie at the mouth of Galway Bay, separated from the mainland by a stretch of water that in bad weather is formidable and in good weather is one of the most beautiful sea passages in Ireland. The islands are reached by ferry from Rossaveel in County Galway or Doolin in County Clare, or by a short flight from Connemara Airport.

The islands are one of the last strongholds of the Irish language as a community language — most islanders speak Irish as their first language and English as their second — and they have a cultural distinctiveness that goes beyond language. The traditional landscape of the islands, with their dense networks of dry-stone walls dividing the grey limestone pavements into small fields, is unlike anything else in Ireland, and the traditional life described in J.M. Synge's book The Aran Islands — he spent several summers on Inis Meain at the end of the nineteenth century — has been modified but not entirely transformed by modernity.

Dun Aonghasa on Inis Mor is one of the most dramatically situated prehistoric monuments in Europe. The great stone fort, its semicircular walls enclosing a cliff-top platform above a sheer 100-meter drop to the sea, was built in several phases from the Bronze Age onward and served as both a defensive structure and, quite possibly, a place of ritual significance. The outer defensive walls are reinforced by a chevaux de frise — a field of densely planted sharp stone pillars designed to prevent cavalry or infantry assault — that creates a surreal visual effect on the approach to the fort. Standing at the cliff edge within the inner wall and looking down at the ocean crashing against the base of the cliff far below is one of those Irish experiences that stays with you indefinitely.

Festivals and Celebrations

Ireland is a country that takes its festivals seriously, and the calendar of cultural events throughout the year provides additional reasons to visit beyond the landscape and the history.

St Patrick's Day, celebrated on March 17, is the most globally recognized Irish festival and is observed with varying degrees of authenticity across the world. In Ireland itself, the celebrations have become increasingly elaborate in recent decades, with the Dublin parade developing from a relatively modest civic procession into an international cultural event attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators. The tradition of dyeing rivers green in American cities — the Chicago River turns an improbable shade of emerald each year — and the sea of shamrocks in lapels around the world on March 17 speak to the reach of the Irish diaspora and its relationship with the homeland it left behind.

The Galway International Arts Festival, held each July, is one of the most important arts festivals in Ireland, bringing theatre, visual art, music, and street performance to a city that has an existing arts infrastructure well above the scale that its population would suggest. The festival's programming is genuinely ambitious, and the combination of formal performances and the spontaneous cultural life of Galway's streets during festival week creates an atmosphere that has no direct equivalent elsewhere in Ireland.

The Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival, held in September, has been running since 1954 and centers on the World Oyster Opening Championship — a competition in opening oysters with speed and precision that attracts competitors from many countries and is taken with a seriousness that would surprise those unfamiliar with the culture. The festival's association with the Galway oyster, grown in the cold clean waters of Galway Bay and widely regarded as among the finest in the world, gives it a culinary credibility that makes it more than a mere spectacle.

The Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann, the national traditional music festival organized by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, is the largest festival of Irish traditional music and culture in the world. Held each August in a different Irish town, it draws several hundred thousand visitors and many thousands of competing musicians from across Ireland and from Irish communities worldwide. The competition element — in which musicians compete in different categories and age groups across a range of instruments and vocal styles — provides structure, but the festival's real energy is in the informal sessions that occur in every pub, street corner, and hotel lobby in the host town for the duration.

The Bloomsday celebration on June 16 in Dublin is one of the most distinctive literary festivals in the world. The date commemorates the single day — June 16, 1904 — on which James Joyce's Ulysses is set, and devotees mark it by retracing the walks of Leopold Bloom through the city, by reading aloud from the novel in pubs and parks, by dressing in Edwardian costume, and by consuming the foods mentioned in the novel, including the kidney that Bloom fries for his breakfast in the opening pages. The celebration has grown significantly since it was established in the 1950s, and it now includes formal events at the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street alongside the informal revelry in the streets.