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“Dublin One” – INCREASING the North-South Divide

“Dublin One” – INCREASING the North-South Divide

The Independent.ie reported on Friday that Dublin has a new “district” and it surprised and puzzled me. I thought one of the fringe areas on the outer commuter belt might have got a new name, but, NO, they were writing about the “new district” called “Dublin One”. What?? A new district? Sounds like a whole pile of bullsh*t….and so it is!

Nearly a year ago, in January 2016, the Dublin Northside Attraction Alliance was founded and it seems that they have done close to nothing for the whole year. They started very confused when they included the Guinness Storehouse in the Northside list of attractions. (You better claim the biggest visitor magnet in Dublin for the Northside even if it is firmly on the Southside!) A website is up but not much else seemed to have happened.

And when you think about it, it does absolutely not make sense to create a deeper divide than there is already. By creating an artificial separation between Northside Attractions and other attractions (there is no “Southside Attractions Alliance”), you don’t market the Northside better, but you fragment our quite small city more and create unnecessary confusion in tourists.

The right thing would be to market DUBLIN (as a whole) and ignore that there is a river separating North and South. So it was an ill-advised initiative to create the Northside Attraction Alliance, but instead of seeing that it failed, now they plan to make it worse:

Last week Dublintown, the trader’s organisation for Dublin, launched “Dublin One”, a new “brand” to promote the area west of O’Connell Street to Capel Street and Parnell Square to the quays. Dublin 1 is already a postal district and doesn’t require any brand. So why a new “brand” was created for a fraction of Dublin 1 is a mystery. Oddly O’Connell Street seems to be EXcluded from the Dublintown district “Dublin One”, it only starts “west of O’Connell Street” according to the website.

Irish Independent journalist Pól Ó Conghaile suggests in his article that it is a great idea. But to subdivide Dublin further instead of pulling together and to promote based on merit and quality rather than on location can’t be a great idea. He mentions some of the highlights on the Northside and while he doesn’t claim it, it could appear that he implies that they are all in “Dublin One”, but they aren’t! Many of the sites he mentions are in Dublin 7 (e.g. K Chido Mexico, Old Jameson Distillery, the old Victorian Fruit & Veg Market).

No, Dublintown, “Dublin One” that only covers part of Dublin 1 and that is intended to discriminate some areas by elevating one small part of Dublin doesn’t make sense! It’s just odd!

Empty Terminal 2 – Where is everybody?

Empty Terminal 2 – Where is everybody?

The economy has improved again in the last few years and there are jobs available in Ireland if you are in the right sector. And while we still hear about emigration and many of us know some people that have temporarily or permanently emigrated, the departure from Ireland seems to have slowed down.

But last Wednesday, I was wondering if everybody had left and I arrived to an empty Ireland. I flew from London Gatwick to Dublin with Aer Lingus and we arrived at Dublin airport just before 20:00. We landed at Terminal 1 and – nonsendically – had to treck the loooong walk across to Terminal 2 to get out of the airport. At the passport check there were no queues and only two immigration officers sat there. When we arrived in the baggage claim hall, the place was deserted. There was nobody else around than the people from our half-empty plane. No other planes arriving. Nobody at customs. And after leaving the baggage claims hall there were just about 5 people sitting on the benches where you wait for the arrival of your loved ones. But they were not waiting for anybody, they read books!

What a surreal experience to arrive in a seemingly abandoned airport! Where was everybody on Wednesday evening???

No Outdoor Christmas Market in Dublin? What’s going on?

No Outdoor Christmas Market in Dublin? What’s going on?

I am VERY passionate about Christmas Markets and if you are a Dublin Event Guide Reader for a while, you probably know that already. I can absolutely not get it why Dublin is incapable of having a good Christmas Market and interestingly, it seems that Galway, Cork, Waterford and Belfast ARE able to have a market that people like and that reliably happens year after year.

This year, there will not be an outdoor Christmas Market at all in Dublin and that is frankly just not good enough for a City that is quite dependent on tourism. I wrote a long piece about the failed St. Stephen’s Green Market in 2014 and about the “I believe in Christmas” market in 2015, that decided the “I believe” part of the name should be trademarked and that called itself “Christmas Tree & Village” not Christmas Market here: www.joergsteegmueller.com/2015/12/08/ireland-and-christmas-markets-it-cant-be-that-difficult/

Both markets were designed by Event Management people, NOT by Christmas Market experts and both markets didn’t deliver. After just one year the “I believe” market is gone again with the result that in 2016, Dublin has NO Christmas Market. Yes, there are some weekend markets with a Christmas theme, but this is not what tourists are interested in and it really isn’t good enough for us living in Dublin either.

So why are they failing? Because the focus is wrong, the location is wrong, food and drink doesn’t get enough attention and they are every time run by the wrong entity/organisation.

1) Focus: The outdoor markets in Dublin have never focused on the visitors, they always seem to focus in maximising the money taken as fees from the traders. This means that there is no proper product selection, but you sometimes find the weirdest “non-Christmas Market-worthy” products at stalls.

2) Location: George’s Dock is a nice venue, but for a Christmas Market it is too far out. It has to be in easy walking distance from the City Centre so that people can drop in and out during their shopping and then finish the day with good food and drink at the market. Dublin has a problem because there is no place in the City Centre. But you need a square or plaza of some sort to build a Christmas village. A long row of stalls (like at St. Stephen’s Green) will NEVER create the atmosphere that is needed.
There are in my opinion two suitable locations already in the City Centre, but only one of them might get the ok from the responsible authorities. In future I see one other area that could be suitable, but it will take a few years until it is available.

3) Food and Drink: It is soooo important to have good food and at least Gluehwein at a Christmas Market. At St. Stephen’s Green, Dublintown screwed up by giving the contract to run 2 or three food outlets to ONE Catering Company. Boring delivery, no variation and no competition. The food and drink offering was totally underwhelming. At some of my favourite markets, I would say at least 50% of the stalls are food and drink stalls. Alcoholic Gluehwein, but also non-alcoholic Glueh”wein” are sold and the food variety is vast. Result: People stay there until late and have their dinner at the market and meet with their friends for an evening out.

4) Organisation in charge: In Dublin it seems that every time the task to run a market is completely handed over to an event management company and the real organiser is getting out of the way. The result is that it is run exactly as any other event, not as an experience or something somebody is passionate about. In all towns I know, the Christmas Market is run by the Town/City Council who have passionate employees working on it really hard. In Dublin, Dublin City Council couldn’t care less about a Christmas Market in Dublin and IF they did care, they would just get an event management company again and not be involved themselves. The passing of responsibility to people that don’t care about this event more than the next 25 that they have to manage has to stop. Dublin Tourism or the Events section in Dublin City Council should run it with the explicit intention to make it an amazing experience for the visitors AND to run it from now for at least 10 years EVERY year not primarily to make money, but because a capital of a European city is expected to have a good quality market in the pre-Christmas period.

There are a few other little bits that are mentioned in the post that I linked to above, but if these few points get the right attention, we could have a great Christmas Market for the long term future. Without giving attention to them, we will have one failure after the next, like we did for the last 5 or so years.

Did I mention that I am very passionate about Christmas Markets? Now you see! ;-)

P.S. I just found what must be one of the most delusional quote of the season, considering the poor show of Dublin: DublinTown CEO Richard Guiney said: “I can’t think of anywhere that does Christmas as well as Dublin.”

Angry journalist suggests tourists in Dublin should go home!

Angry journalist suggests tourists in Dublin should go home!

The Irish Independent published an article on Thursday 17 November, in which Ita O’Kelly, an angry and seemingly narrow-minded journalist suggests that Dublin is chocked by too many tourists and therefore the tourists should go home.

Oddly the whole article doesn’t contain one strong argument that supports her opinion. She claims that it is the fault of all the tourists that Dublin has way too many coffee shops and totally ignores that the many coffee shops have queues out the door every single day of employees on their lunch breaks (tourists don’t wear suits!). Then she has an issue with “falling over” people reading maps when she just wants to go from A to B. Somehow she also blames tourists for the fact that a “vast number of people are begging on the streets”. But there is absolutely no correlation between these two and no evidence is provided how tourists (who in most cases are a lot less “generous” than Irish people when it comes to beggars) have put these beggars in the street. Street “entertainer” (the “” are put in by her) are allegedly also only there for the tourists and the nonsensical (and factually incorrect) sentence “When the city hosts free music events for its citizens, it’s virtually impossible to get a seat as the tickets have been snagged by the tourists.” just crowns a rubbish article. (Most free music events that “the city hosts” are not ticketed and are certainly not intended exclusively for its citizens. And if tickets have to be pre-booked or if they are available at the venue, tourists would never get priority over non-tourists.

Ita O’Kelly, who also seems to be angry about the impertinence of people preferring gluten-free food even if the have no medical condition, wants her Dublin back with no ice-cream parlours, no coffee shops and with a few billion Euro less per year (the money made from tourists in whole Ireland is 7bn per year). She doesn’t say “Make Dublin great again!”, but her thinking seems to be as open minded as Trump’s who wants to “Make America great again”

The oddest part about this rubbish is that the Irish Independent published it and most likely even paid for it!

Dublin is a cool place and visitors as well as inhabitants from all over the world are very very welcome!

Odd behaviour of Ryanair passengers? Are they all beginners?

Odd behaviour of Ryanair passengers? Are they all beginners?

I haven’t used Ryanair for a while. Not because I have a problem with the company, but because they decided to stop flying to where I would like to go in Germany, so I had to go back using Aer Lingus. But this week I flew to Italy and Rome Ciampino was the most suitable airport to fly to. Ryanair flies there and the prices were ok, so we were in business.

Last time I flew with Ryanair they didn’t have any seat allocation yet, but it was a first come, first served approach when you get into the plane. That has changed now and you get seats allocated or (for a surcharge) can select them yourself. The consequence of this is that EVERY single person entering that plane knows exactly that there is a seat waiting for them and they know exactly where this seat is.

So can anybody explain the scenario in this picture to me? Why do approximately 150 people jump up from their seat as if someone has put needles under their backside as soon as boarding of this plane is even hinted?

Everybody has a seat assigned, so what do you gain by standing there for 10 minutes before the hinted boarding actually starts? Why do people still jump up as if it was a first come, first served seat allocation?

Is it just the space for the hand luggage that gets them to be mad impatient? We got on board as one of the last ones and there was still space for hand luggage.

Human beings are the most irrational species it seems! ;-)

 
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