Where culture meets chaos

Humour, stuffed animals and hen parties - Dublin has them all in abundance. By Serena Mackesy

I love Ireland. I don't know any other country where you can get into a taxicab and almost guarantee that the driver won't be plugged in to some easy listening station or phone-in rant show, but will instead be tuned into high-grade discussions of international politics. The Irish may have troubles and questions, high unemployment and rural depopulation, a staggering intake of alcohol and a tramp on most street corners, but by gum they've got their brains intact.

And their sense of humour. The Irish are so at ease with the quantities of culture around them that they sling insults with gay abandon. Dublin is liberally scattered with statuary, and each one has a nickname. Molly Malone, who graces the end of Grafton Street with a generous show of her embonpoint, is known as the Tart with the Cart. North of the river, on O'Connell Street, Anna Livia, Joyce's Spirit of the Liffey, reclines languidly in a tumbling fountain. She is fondly referred to as the Floozy in the Jacuzzi.

Dublin combines the best of many worlds: it's a mini-Edinburgh, without the wind-chill factor; it has the graceful squares of Bath with none of the self-conscious respectability; it has the laid-back funkiness of Amsterdam without the pickled herring. It's also full of Americans expressing disappointment at the lack of similarity to Boston on St Patrick's Day, but you can't have everything.

One of the things that makes Dublin lovable is that everything, but everything, has burnt down at least once. Either that, or its foundations have turned out to have been established on a peat bog, and it's fallen down. The ornately plastered Post Office was closed for 13 years after the 1916 uprising and James Gandon's splendid Customs House was gutted in 1921. Christchurch cathedral, originally built by the Danes in 1038, was rebuilt in stone by the legendary Earl of Pembroke, Strongbow, from 1170. Two steeples burnt down and then the south wall collapsed in 1560. Most of it, flying buttresses and all, dates back only to the 1870s. It retains one of the finest crypts in Europe, stacked with discarded carvings and tombstones and the bodies of a cat and mouse found mummified in the organ pipes.

The nearby St Patrick's, built for tax purposes just outside the old city walls, actually straddles the river Poddle, thereby depriving itself of a crypt. It was burnt down in 1316 and in 1362 and was used as a stable by Cromwell. Only the Record Tower remains of Dublin Castle's Norman history: the rest went in the siege of 1534, the fire of 1684, the Easter Rising of 1916 and the general disrespect for antiquity of its various occupants. Culture and chaos make a potent combination.

Dublin, strung out along the embanked Liffey, looking strikingly like Paris, is a great recuperation spot. To the north and south are the slow- moving, soothing seaside towns of Howth and Dalkey. The Wicklow mountains are 16km from the city centre. Culture buffs can wear out their shoe leather gawping at the Book of Kells, the fabulous collection in the National Gallery (currently closed for refurbishment, but due to reopen in May), the completely barking Natural History Museum, whose collection of stuffed animals, all bearing snarls, makes it a bit like the Bates Motel without the showers, and deeply covetable Bronze Age gold jewellery in the National Museum. The Georgian grandeur of Merrion and St Stephen's Squares wrings lottery-winning fantasies from cynical mouths. Trinity College's cloistered greenness can actually swallow the polyester pantsuits that decamp from tour buses at its gates. And that's just in one half-kilometre square.

Then again, there are greater things than culture. Local culture, for instance, which mostly consists of wandering from bar to bar becoming increasingly garrulous. This is a good thing, as no one's going to be writing postcards about the standards of cuisine. The variety of drinking establishments defies belief.

Top bars for atmosphere are Doheny and Nesbitt's on Baggot St Lower, a popular spill-over for political skulduggery from the Dail round the corner, and Toner's, immediately opposite, a cosier establishment, which started life as a grocer's and has the traditional snugs where you can quaff your Guinness without fear of outside intrusion. The Shelbourne Hotel is where the luvvies generally tope when they're in town. Ollie Reed was doing his stuff when I was last in there, though this sent my American companion into such paroxysms of excitement I had to haul her off to the less grand but far older Brazen Head in Bridge Street, a pub that claims to have first opened its doors in 1198.

On the way home, we were chatting to the taxi driver. We agreed that the bomb in the Imran Khan hospital was highly suspicious and that we all hated the World Bank. "Do you get a lot of drunken English in your cab?" I asked. "Sure," he said, "Especially lately. Lots of girls over for hen parties". "Oh, God," I said, "That must be a pain". "Ah, not really. They're safe here, you see. They can have a few drinks and a bit of fun and not get into trouble unless they pick a fight with the Garda. They're not even that likely to get knocked down by a car."

FIVE ESSENTIALS: DUBLIN

Fly on Ryanair (0171-435 7101) from Stansted or Luton for pounds 64 including tax, if you stay over two nights or a Saturday night. The airline also flies from Gatwick, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Prestwick. From 9 May, services to Dublin commence from Bournemouth, Cardiff and Leeds/Bradford. Aer Lingus (0181-899 4747), British Airways Express (0345 222111) British Midland (0345 554554) and Virgin Atlantic (01293 747747) fly from a variety of UK airports to the Irish capital.

Sail on the Stena Line High-speed Sea Service between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire - from where you can get the Dart railway to central Dublin. Stena (0990 707070) has a weekend fare of pounds 164 to pounds 214, depending on the season, for a car and up to five people.

Stay at the Clarence Hotel from June. Members of the band U2 are behind the refurbishment of this hotel on Wellington Quay into a five-star hotel. Dial 00 353 1 670 9000 for details of the introductory rate of IRpounds 130, room only.

Stagger around the capital on the Literary Pub Crawl, sponsored by Jameson. It takes place every evening at 7.30pm, and costs pounds 6 plus drinks. Meet upstairs at the Duke pub in Duke Street; call 00 353 1 454 0228 for more.

Ask Bord Failte/Irish Tourist Board, 150 New Bond Street, London W1Y 0AQ (0171-493 3201) for further information.