Beware of Coppers says CNN

pajunior wrote: »

A good old country boy jealous of the lads in the big shhhhhmoke :pac:

PAjunior, A Celbridge man, talking about the big smoke as if hes from there :pac:

I never go near Coppers, I'm lactose intolerant and so have to avoid easy singles.

I'm from Dublin originally and I really don't find it a very attractive city to spend time in.

In general I find that Dublin has an over-blown sense of how big it is. In general. It has a lot of sprawl and suburban stuff, but in general the city centre itself is pretty unimpressive.

I live in Cork and I would have to say that it's a far more livable urban space than Dublin is. It has almost all of the same shops, facilities and everything else. It has a really good cultural vibe to it too with quite a lot going on at night but it doesn't have many of the down sides of Dublin.

The main thing that puts me off Dublin is the fact that you are regularly accosted by junkies. It happens at bus stops, at Luas stops, at ATMs. I even found sitting out in terraces outside cafés can be kind of scary when you just keep on getting approached by people looking for cash.

Also in the past few years. I was living in Ballsbridge and we had cars torched in our carpark outside the apartment. We were broken into twice and I have had my car vandalised in Dublin on more occasions than I care to remember e.g. wipers snapped off, scratched, mirrors broken that kind of petty thing while parked in the city centre.

All that stuff puts me off the city in a huge way.

Also, I find if I want to go to an actual big city I will tend to just get a Ryanair flight to London, Paris or somewhere with an actual bit of scale.

I'm not just trying to mindlessly slag Dublin off, but it has to tackle some of the thuggery and the heroin problem. I really many Dubliners are oblivious to how bad it is and how bad it looks.

The situation is not the same in Cork and it's not the same in most other European cities that I am familiar with.

Dublin's heroine problem is really 'in your face' the minute you set foot in the city centre.

The characters hanging around outside Huston and Connolly stations are absolutely frightening and nobody seems to do anything about it.

I also find that most suburban Dubliners tend to stay in the suburbs / shopping centres which kind of undermines the city centre in a lot of ways.

It just never feels like it has managed to morph into a 'living, breathing city' which I think is something that Cork has managed to pull off very well, especially since the refurbishment of the city centre etc since the 2000s.

I'm not trying to slag off Dublin, rather give it some constructive criticism.

It really needs to take a look at itself and stop pretending that the City = the area around Grafton Street.

There are large swathes of the city centre that have huge potential but were let go into wreck and ruin from the 1950s onwards and they have never recovered.

The drugs problem is also out of hand and it is not being addressed properly and has been let grow and grow over the past decade under FF's incompetent rule. That has to change!

It's like Dubliners have become completely desensitised to the problems around them. That's never a good thing as they will not be addressed if someone's not pointing them out.

Also, when it comes to night life, the licensing laws in Ireland are utterly ridiculous. They have to be liberalised to allow later opening and proper night clubs. The current system is a complete joke and it does nothing to discourage drinking and causes the usual problems of dumping very drunk people into the streets in vast numbers.
(not unique to Dublin, but still from a tourism point of view it's a big deal)