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!
