Dublin

Dublin's name comes from the Irish Dubh Linn, the dark pool where the River Poddle met the Liffey. Vikings established a fortified base here in 841, and after the Anglo-Norman arrival in the twelfth century the town became the centre of English power in Ireland, with Dublin Castle as its seat of government for centuries.

The eighteenth century brought the city's great building boom: wide streets, grand public buildings and the Georgian squares still admired today. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were turbulent, from the Act of Union and the Great Famine to the 1916 Easter Rising, centred on the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, and independence that followed. Dublin's literary reputation, built by writers such as Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett, was recognised when UNESCO named it a City of Literature.

Dubliners are known for their quick humour and love of talk, and much of social life plays out in cafés, on park benches and at traditional music sessions. The Irish language appears on every street sign, Gaelic games draw big crowds to Croke Park, and St Patrick's Day on 17 March brings a parade and festival to the city. Dublin is also an increasingly diverse capital, with communities from around the world, including a long-established Muslim community served by mosques and prayer halls across the city.