Dublin audiotours

Dublin has produced more writers per square kilometre than almost any comparably sized city on earth, and it is not shy about this. Oscar Wilde was born on Westland Row in 1854. Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, was born in Clontarf. Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw both took their Nobel Prizes in literature home to the city where they grew up. James Joyce set Ulysses on the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904, a day now celebrated annually as Bloomsday, when people walk the route Leopold Bloom walked through the city eating the very kidneys he ate in Eccles Street. The National Library of Ireland holds the original manuscript of Ulysses. Trinity College holds the Book of Kells, an illustrated gospel from around 800 AD that remains the finest example of Insular manuscript art in existence.

The Guinness Brewery at St James's Gate has been operating since Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the site in 1759.

The Storehouse is now a museum and the most visited tourist attraction in the country, with the Gravity Bar at the top offering a 360-degree view of the city with a complimentary pint. Georgian Dublin, the terraces of red-brick townhouses around Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square built in the 18th century when Dublin was the second city of the British Empire, remain largely intact and house much of the professional class today. The Ha'penny Bridge over the River Liffey, a cast-iron footbridge from 1816 named for the toll that was charged to cross it, is as close to a city symbol as Dublin has.