Why is Dublin such a shιtty city?

A Jaysus. Is it that time of year again?

Dublin is no better or worse than most other cities. The issue with Dublin as I see it is that the city centre is very cramped. You can barely walk on the footpath around College Green it gets so busy. That is largely due to Dubin's Viking origins. Compared to a lot of other cities, Dublin is old. Also it didnt suffer any extensive war damage so there has never been the need to rebuild from stratch like say, most German cities.

I live in England now. If you think Dublin is bad then visit some of the lesser known cities over here. Then you will discover the true meaning of the words dire/grim/dump.

I don't mind you calling it a dump at all, it's the thinking of Cork and Galway being better that's laughable. I do like those places though.

You haven't put forward any facts mate, unlike the things I mentioned, such as net migration and property prices.

agree with all of that 100%, the city center is a joke, junkies and dealers everywhere and not a cop in sight most of the time.. try walking down the boardwalk in the evening time and you would probably get yourself a punch in the face

I'm a Dub but I love Cork, my wife is from near Cork city and it's a great spot. It has issues same as Dublin but you would have to be thin skinned to write off a city because there's some anti social stuff that goes on sometimes.

sometimes? its a daily thing up there, just go to the jervis luas stop and its a constant thing, i always say surely the cops could have a presence just at this stop alone?

Dublin can be Heaven, with coffee at 11, and a stroll round Stephan's Green.

Cmon all together now

I agree in that sense- the north side O'Connell Street/Parnell Square etc is pretty nasty. If you are a tourist heading back to the airport you are also subject to Dorset Street which is pretty grim.

I think another differnece with Dublin and other capitals is that the centre is too close to some very **** areas hence the druggies etc are readily in view. In a lot of other capitals I can think of the undiserables are further out of the centre.

I hear what you are saying and it may seem like a poor excuse but I spend quite a lot of time in Germany and in German cities (ok maybe an extreme example) and pretty much all of them had the centres levelled (Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dresden etc etc). All rebuilt from stratch- now admitedly the blank canvas was perhaps there already.

Ok fine...it's all the fault of the "planners".

Probably does explain it somewhat. The north inner city is not nice, and as other's have mentioned, one of the big problems with Dublin is that a lot of the **** areas are close to the center - unlike in other cities. If you lived in Rathmines, Ranelagh, Clonskeagh, Dundrum... you'd have had a different experience.

I really think it's mad how people detest the addicts in town so much. Products of all kinds of failures within the state and families or lack of families.

They are mostly harmless and just living an absolutely miserable life and people just hurl abuse at them online all the time.

I had a heroin addict asking me for money in Killarney last year by the way, addiction isn't exclusive to Dublin, what you see in Dublin is just a reflection of the whole country on a larger scale.

e.g. terrible public transport, awful traffic, ugly buildings and poor planning - these are nationwide problems, Galway is probably the worst planned place I've ever been, and the traffic is shocking.

Ha ha, yes.. you have (probably unwittingly) helped confirm my point.

I have found that to catalyse change in Ireland it is better to communicate with concerned organisations outside the country. Communicating with those responsible in the country will lead to you being put on a Christmas card list at best...

As Joe Duffy would say, Dublin is indeed an unadulterated kip. Like OP I’ve been in many European capitals and none worse than Dublin in terms of scumminess. It really does reflect badly on “social engineering” through the decades that generations of the super-uneducated to dominate the street life of the core of our capital. I’m not sure exactly what lies behind it, but it has surely got to be connected with our educational system which sees substantial numbers through to third level but fails others so extremely badly that they end up being extremely anti-social. All cities have their drug problems, but in Dublin it seems to utterly dominate the surface.

In a previous life I worked in an area where I saw positive results from adult education. I saw where a lot of people with literacy problems had fallen by the wayside and when these were remedied great strides were made and these same people were able to subsequently support their own children to achieve. That’s why I believe our education system is quite flawed in the places it fails, it does so badly.

You asked about safety in Dublin though. You also lived in the north inner city, where there is a high concentration of scumbags. That's like using Lewisham or Tottenham as an example of what life is like in London. Wander into certain parts of London and the place is a kip too. (I love London by the way, but you're using a not that nice part of Dublin to characterise the city.

And I am aware of Dublin's issues, it does have issues with scumbags running around and junkies in the city centre, but I don't think they're all that different to many other cities. I think the junkies in the city centre is the big thing that stands out about Dublin over other cities.