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Sometime in the late fifties, the Dublin writer Brendan Behan was having a drink in the Cafe Deux Magots in Paris when he got into conversation with an American literary critic. The critic asked Behan whether he had ever known James Joyce. Behan replied no, he hadn't had that honour, but his mother had once served a meal to W.B Yeats in some grand Georgian house on St. Stephen's Green. The poet, added Behan, had turned his nose up at the parsnips.

“He didn't like parsnips?” said the American, suddenly reaching for his notebook, “You're sure this is factual?”

Behan assured him that the information was quite correct: it was definitely parsnips to which Yeats had had an aversion, not carrots or any other vegetable. The critic excitedly scribbled in his book: Parsnips- attitude of Yeats to.

“And you say he didn't like Stephen's greens either,” continued the man, looking up from his pad. “Now what kind of vegetable are they?”

St. Stephen's Green, far from being a vegetable, is in fact the grandest Georgian square in Dublin, indeed one of the grandest squares in all Europe. If you have a generous budget you may be staying on St. Stephen's Green at the Shelbourne, Dublin's premier hotel - and even if you are not, it is probably as good a place as any to start on a walk around the city. This is because the Shelbourne does a truly epic breakfast spread, and taking your morning kipper here would not only prime you for the walk ahead, it would also give you a good excuse to see inside this great Dublin institution: the hotel was a favourite haunt of Joyce, and came to be such a central part of Irish life that in 1922 the country's constitution was actually drafted in one of the hotel's conference rooms.

Walking down the steps of the Shelbourne and looking around you at the elegant Georgian houses with their pedimented porticoes and cast iron railings, you are immediately confronted with Dublin's central paradox. Here is a Catholic country with an inspirational Celtic-Gaelic culture, but whose capital - rigidly planned on a gridiron, coldly classical in style - is largely a monument to the taste of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy who dominated Dublin until Independence in 1922. For this reason the architecture of Georgian Dublin has as much in common with Bath or London as it does with anywhere in Ireland; indeed to this day the old folk of rural Cork and Kerry tend to regard the city as something of a foreign intrusion on the side of Ireland.

Which, historically, it always has been: situated at the mouth of the Liffey, at one of the narrowest points in the Irish Sea, Dublin has always been a bridgehead for foreign invaders. The city was founded by Ireland's Viking conquerors, who built a fortified harbour for their longships on the site; subsequently it was conquered by Anglo-Norman adventurers who for the first time turned Dublin into a British garrison town, a function it retained for seven hundred years. Trinity College, Dublin's renowned university, was a bastion of Anglo-Irish Protestantism from which Catholics were discouraged as recently as 1970; the city's two cathedrals are both Protestant institutions to this day.


The best place in Dublin to appreciate Irish Celtic culture unadulterated by any connection with England is the National Museum of Ireland which lies almost directly behind the Shelbourne: turn right out of the hotel then right again into Kildare Street. This is because the National Museum is home to many of Ireland's finest treasures from the Celtic golden age that preceded the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1170. Filling the entire ground floor gallery is an astonishing permanent exhibition of Ireland's prehistoric gold. It is like a treasure trove from some ancient Irish legend: war trumpets and chariot fittings fit for Finn MacCool lie glinting under the spotlights; huge gold bracelets and intricately detailed Early Christian brooches glitter from plinths.

One treasure of Celtic Art that has eluded the National Museum collection is the great Book of Kells which lies in the Old Library of Trinity College a short walk down Kildare Street, left along Nassau Street and right into TCD's clearly signposted side entrance. This astonishing ninth century gospel book is the great masterpiece of Celtic manuscript illumination; indeed it represents one of the most astonishing artistic achievements of the Middle Ages: intricate and deftly inventive, it is also peculiarly Celtic in its mixture of humour and intense religious feeling. An excellent new permanent exhibition giving the period's cultural and historical background has spread the crowds in the library and means you no longer have to queue to see the book itself; moreover the display well conveys the extraordinary degree of effort that was needed to make such a book in the early Middle Ages: the pages are vellum- calf skin painstakingly cleaned and stretched over a period of months - while the paints had to be brought to the shores of the Celtic world from the other ends of the earth: the red is kermes, produced from the pregnant body of a Mediterranean insect, kermococcus vermilio; purples and maroons came from a rare Anatolian plant crozopheria tinctoric; while most extraordinary of all, the blue was from crushed lapis lazuli, brought along the Silk Road from the mines of Badakshan in Northern Afghanistan.

After leaving the library, walk through the courts of Trinity, past the cricket pitches and croquet lawns, and leave the college through its imposing main gate. From there follow the signs straight ahead along Dame Street then right down Temple Lane Street to the Temple Bar, once Dublin's red light district, now the city's cultural quarter where the art galleries, theatres and design studios are all clustered. The Temple Bar's narrow pedestrianised cobbled streets are always full of buskers, jugglers and street artists; the area is, however, at its best at night and if you have a spare evening make a point of coming back here when the pubs are full, the fiddlers are playing and the Guinness-swillers are spilling out on to the streets.

From Temple Bar find your way through the mediaeval Merchant's Arch onto the Liffey Water Front where Ha'penny Bridge meets Wellington Quay. The Liffey is the lifeblood of Dublin, and it is here more than anywhere that you feel yourself in the heart of the city, and can appreciate (in Jan Morris's words) “the Joyceness of Dublin, the Yeatsness, the pubness, the tramness, the Liffeyness, the Behanness, in short the Dublinness of the place hanging like a vapour over the city”. Cross the road, so that you can walk along the riverside, then take a left and walk upstream towards the bend in the river. Here the north bank is punctuated by what many consider to be Dublin's most beautiful building, James Gandon's 1789 classical masterpiece, the Four Courts (Dublin's central law courts). Its great copper dome rises above the magnificent columnated rotunda to crown the heart of the city.

By this stage, despite your large Shelbourne breakfast, you will probably be ready for lunch, or at any rate a restoring glass of Guinness. Just after you have passed the Four Courts take a left up Bridge Street then immediately take a right into the yard of The Brazen Head, Dublin's oldest pub, reputedly founded in 1198, although there is no written evidence for it predating the seventeenth century. It is certainly one of the prettiest pubs in Dublin, with roaring log fires, a low roof, red tile floors and wooden panelling. Apparently a favourite with Joyce, he mentions it briefly in Ulysses - “you get a decent enough do in the Brazen Head” - something that is still true today: try the Dublin Coddle: a thick welter of vegetable soup into which a slop of Irish stew and the remains of the morning's breakfast sausages appear to have been thrown; it looks pretty dubious, but tastes surprisingly delicious.

After you have downed your coddle and drained your glass of Guinness, retrace your steps along the Liffey, past the Four Courts, then take the third right up Parliament Street. This will bring you up past the City Hall to Dublin Castle. Until 1922 the Castle was the seat of the British Viceroy and was the place from which was organised the enforcement of the repressive eighteenth century Penal Laws, the notorious series of measures which disenfranchised all Irish Catholics as well as banning them from Parliament, the bar, the bench, the university and the navy, and stripping them of almost all their land. Suitably enough, the symbolic figure of Justice that crowns the arch into the castle has her back turned on the city, is unblindfolded and carries a sword in an unusually threatening manner. The place still has an oddly sinister and threatening feeling to it: after the bustle and colour of the streets outside, the castle quadrangle feels oddly grey and empty, silent but for the sound of leaves blowing across the cobbles and the distant echo of seagulls. The Georgian architecture is as sober and coldly rational as the Celtic art of the Book of Kells is spontaneous and humorous: an authentic expression of Hanoverian Protestantism at its most severe and least sympathetic. Note the Castle's one surviving mediaeval tower, tucked away in a small second courtyard east of the main court. The rest of the mediaeval building was blown up by accident in 1684 by the British viceroy, Lord Arran, who later wrote to assure King James II, that the monarch had only lost “six barrels of [gun]powder and the worst castle in the worst situation in all Christendom.”

There are regular tours of the Castle, but the eighteenth century interiors have all been hideously restored with over-bright gilt and thick pile carpeting so that it all feels rather like an upmarket lunatic asylum. Instead, after you have admired the Castle's exterior, your time would probably be better spent going around DVBLINA, an impressively state-of the-art exhibition of Dublin's history, complete with a series of wax models making up tableau from the city's story and a commentary via personal stereo. This exhibition can be found a short walk away, left out of the Castle, down Lord Edward Street, past the cathedral and right into Winetavern Street.

DVBLINA's display leads via a bridge directly into the gallery of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin's oldest building. Although heavily restored during the last century, the cathedral is full of interest. Half way up the nave lies the effigy of Strongbow, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, the Anglo-Norman warlord who initiated England's troubled connection with Ireland when he invaded the country in 1170. While down in the crypt - virtually the only part of Strongbow's original Norman cathedral still to survive - lies a wonderful medley of centuries of ecclesiastical lumber. This is includes objects as bizarre as a stuffed cat and mouse that got stuck down one of the cathedral organ pipes sometime in the eighteenth century, and a set of stocks, formerly used to secure the legs of criminals while passers-by pelted them with rotten eggs and other selected Dublin delicacies.

Finally, make your way due south for half a mile down Nicholas Street to Christ Church's great rival, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the great neo-Gothic church said to stand on the site of a small chapel built by St. Patrick himself beside a well where he first baptised converts to Christianity; centuries later the cathedral again became famous as the burial place of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels and sometime Dean of the cathedral.

St. Patrick's is probably the best place in the whole city to imagine Dublin's former inhabitants, for the nave is cluttered solid with memorials to them: small lines of Elizabethan figures in ruffs, kneeling down locked in prayer; lifesize statues of Jacobean fops dripping with silk and lace and powdered wigs; strutting ascendancy figures pirouetting on their plinths or sitting locked in meditation, gripping their patrician robes. My personal favourite is the huge marble image of John McNeill Boyd R.N, a massive nineteenth century Dublin seadog in frockcoat and cravat, his face bristling with mutton-chop whiskers as he grabs a rope and points manfully to the Deep; a sad inscription tells how Mc.Neill was eventually “lost off the coast of Kingsdown in an attempt to save the crew of the brig, Neptune”.

By the time you emerge from St. Patrick's you will no doubt have developed a healthy Dublin thirst. It's time to retrace your steps to the Temple Bar: the pubs will soon be opening, the black vials of Guinness swilling over the bar and the fiddlers beginning to fiddle...

ESSENTIAL DUBLIN

1. A play at the Abbey Theatre: founded almost a hundred years ago by Lady Gregory, J.M Synge and W.B Yeats, the theatre has been at the forefront of new Irish writing ever since and has premiered the work of several generations of Irish playwrights.

2. Tea at Bewlays Oriental Cafe: tea, gossip and sticky cakes with the old lady in hats and the hissing tea urns of Grafton Street: “Bejesus, you don't say?” “Ah, sure I'm telling you Cathleen, I heard it from Maire just this morning...”

3. The Casino at Marino: this being Ireland, the casino at Marino is neither a casino nor a marina. It is in fact one of the finest eighteenth century buildings in Ireland, originally designed as a pleasure house for the Earl of Charlemont by the architect Sir William Chambers in the late 1750's. Today it lies marooned in splendid isolation off the Malahide Road, a little to the north of the junction with Howth Road in Clontarf.

4. A pint of Guinness at the Guinness Brewery and Hop Store: drink one of the ten million glasses of Guinness brewed each day at this, the Dublin brewery where Arthur Guinness first began brewing his peat-black porter in 1759. There is also a film, exhibition and brewing museum, all at James's Gate, the Liberties, a short walk from Christ Church Cathedral.

5. A walk in Phoenix Park. At 700 hectares, Phoenix Park is double the size of New York's Central Park, and is said to be the world's largest walled park; it is certainly one of the most beautiful. Contained within it are the Dublin Zoo and the Wellington Monument Obelisk, as well as the headquarters of the Irish Garda (police) and residences of the Irish President and the American Ambassador.

6. Merrion Square: After St. Stephen's Green, this is the smartest Georgian Square in Dublin. Oscar Wilde was born in number 1, Merrion Square North, while Yeats lived at number 82, Merrion Square South. During the Potato Famine a soup kitchen was set up for the starving in the gardens in the middle of the square; today it makes a lovely place to sit in the sun and read the paper.

7. St. Michan's Church: a good place to take difficult teenage children who hate visiting old churches. This is because the crypt of St. Michan's contains a series of horrible mummified bodies supposedly dating back to Crusader times (though probably actually seventeenth century). Until recently the priest would let you shake the mummies hands, though this is now apparently discouraged.

8. The Chester Beatty Library: take a break from Irishness for an hour or two to enjoy one of Europe's greatest collection of Oriental manuscripts. Left to the nation by the Irish mining millionaire, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, his astonishing collection is housed in a cluster of shabby buildings in the leafy Dublin suburbs (though it will be moving to Dublin Castle in four years time). It has some important Biblical papyri, a few wonderful Chinese and Japanese paintings and prints, but its Mughal manuscript collection is arguably the greatest in the world. As well as a revolving display of the collection's highlights, the library also mounts occasional loan exhibitions.

9. Kilmainham Gaol: Where else but in Ireland could an unusually grim Victorian jail became a tourist attraction? Kilmainham entered the Irish national consciousness when many of its Independence heroes were locked up here by the British and its alumni include Robert Emmet, Charles Stewart Parnell and William Collins. The bizarre exhibition includes a display of British padlocks and some prison menus. Inside the jail itself a gruesome gibbet has been reconstructed, so this is not recommended for small children, though this sort of thing (as with the corpses of St. Michan's) inevitably delights teenagers.

10. The Dublin Pub Crawl: No visit to Dublin is complete without trailing around Dublin's pubs. One of the liveliest is the Oliver St. John Gogarty in the Temple Bar: twirly wirly folk music downstairs, Dublin oysters (and Gogarthy's excellent Irish stew) upstairs. Other key pubs on any Dublin pub crawl are O'Donoghues and Boheny & Nesbitt on Baggot Street. A simple rule of thumb when selecting Dublin pubs: if it is so crowded you can barely squeeze through the door, it is probably O.K.

Accommodation:

1. The Shelbourne Hotel, 27 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2. Expensive, but probably the best hotel in Ireland and certainly the first choice in Dublin for those who can afford it. Comfortable, well situated, stylish and with good food (not that common in Dublin), it is also central modern Irish history: the country's constitution was written in one of the Shelbourne's conference rooms.

2. The Mont Clare, Merrion Square, Dublin 2. Another expensive but classic old world hotel in central Dublin, next to Oscar Wilde's birthplace. Half the size of the Shelbourne, but a slightly noisier position: make sure to ask for a quiet room..

3. The Hibernian Hotel, Eastmoreland Place, Dublin 4. Imposing red brick building ten minutes walk from St. Stephen's Green. Recently redecorated, it has spectacular bathrooms, stylish food and impeccable service.

4. Bloom's Hotel, 6 Anglesea Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. Pretty hideous from the outside, but nice rooms and well situated near the action of the lively Temple Bar area. Make sure, however, that you ask for a quiet room to avoid buskers playing fiddles, pipes or even didgeridoos immediately underneath your room.

5. The Grey Door, 22-23 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2. Well restored, centrally located Georgian townhouse with good rooms and friendly, humorous staff. Two excellent restaurants including Pier 32 which specialises in Irish seafood.

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