Join Karl Whitney for a in depth tour of O’Connell Street. Dublin’s main street is invigoratingly contradictory. It’s simultaneously monumental and the site of the deeply ordinary everyday life of the city. For some it is a riddle to be solved – its untapped potential perennially and tortuously just out of reach. For others, tourists and public transport users, it’s a point of departure or arrival. It’s the site of occasional riot and frequent organised protest.

‘Life is timeless, Europe endless’, the German synthpop pioneers Kraftwerk once sang. O’Connell Street extends far beyond its geographic and temporal boundaries. In line with its dual monumental/everyday identity, the street stands at the intersection between the foundational moment of the Irish state – the reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office – and the quotidian banality of life as it’s lived.

The street endlessly gestures forwards and backwards in time. It is periodically subjected to bourgeois fantasies of domestication – the latest being the Dublin City Taskforce report – yet its character persists. The street was largely rebuilt after the destruction wreaked during the Easter Rising, and pockets of dereliction and disuse once again characterise its northern section part. But this is also a reminder that O’Connell Street doesn’t stand alone; it is part of the north inner city, and one bleeds into the other.

Beginning at Easons and working its way up the street to the junction with Parnell Street, this walk will address the history of the street, its potential futures, and will explore the joys and contradictions of O’Connell Street, drawing on personal anecdote, literary sources (Joyce, Beckett, Nevil Shute and Raymond Queneau), illustrating O’Connell Street’s vast and complex relationship with Ireland, Dublin, modernity and the urban imaginary.

Karl Whitney is an Irish writer, journalist, and researcher. He is the author of Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin (2014), a book that uncovers overlooked and forgotten aspects of Dublin’s history and urban landscape.

Meet your tour guide under the clock at Eason’s O’Connell Street. Pre-book only.

Wheelchair accessible route