DUBLIN

● GETTING THERE

● Fly from Auckland to Dublin, via Hong Kong, with Cathay Pacific, with Economy Class fares from $1559 in helloworld’s UK and Europe sale. literary pubs. But, he pointed out, “for a long time, we weren’t always that kind to them”. Joyce and Beckett, for example, emigrated to continental Europe, while Yeats relied on benefactors to pay his bills.

Quilligan hosts a lively literary pub crawl that introduces visitors to The Bailey, The Brazen Head, The Bleeding Horse and other watering-holes frequented by writers or featured in their works. Actors re-enact passages from Joyce, Beckett, Wilde “I have nothing to declare but my genius” and Behan the selfconfessed “drinker with a writing problem” as visitors sip their Guinness.

The tour begins in the 19th century Duke pub with actors reciting from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which one Irish theatre critic famously described as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. It moves to the quad in Trinity College, where visitors learn about writers who studied there before meandering through more pubs and prose, ending at Davy Byrne’s.

If Dublin seemed a bit indifferent to writers in decades past, it has more than