Saturday, 17-Aug-2024


I’ve moved into my new apartment in Dublin.

I am now a resident of Dublin 8, specifically an area known as The Liberties.

It’s a beautiful section of the city – close to the central city, an 8min bike ride from Trinity, and a short walk from pretty much everything I could ask for. The view out my window is unequivocally Dublin – The Guinness Brewery rises to one side, St Patrick’s Cathedral to the other, and the John’s Lane Church (Church of St Augustine and St John) soars right in the middle.

It’s beautiful, and I was ecstatic to hear that the community manager for my apartment would be organizing a walking tour of the neighborhood. I signed up immediately.

I knew I was a gentrifier, since towering steel and glass monstrosity, but I didn’t quite realize the scope of the situation until our guide started explaining it all to us. The Liberties is an old part of Dublin, and had historically been a fairly low income area… It’s not a bad, or dangerous, neighborhood by any means, but it’s also not a thriving or wealthy neighborhood.

Our guide walked us through the town – showing us some amazing landmarks, some challenging parts of history, and some very interesting little tidbits about the town.

It all crystallized into a clear picture to me – this was a community, nothing like what I’d left behind in Oregon. As we walked, our guide’s family members popped out their doors or windows to say hi. His Grandma waved from a balcony, and his niece and nephew swept by on their bikes. Friends came out to welcome us, and schoolkids that he’d taught shouted greetings from the other side of the street.

It was vibrant, and lived in, and growing.

I can’t wait to get to know it better.

A few standout things to mention:
– We saw the oldest fruit tree in Ireland! A pear tree, over 200 years old.
– We walked through a community park, brand new, that the people of the Liberties had been lobbying for for years, and had finally gotten approved.
– We had the opportunity to see a small community test garden, used to help bring schoolkids out of the city and into a small oasis of growing things
– Our guide is a beekeeper, who runs a series of 50+ hives throughout Dublin, ensuring the pollinator population remains strong

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberties,_Dublin