Dublin — Capital of Ireland

Dublin's name tells its own story: the English version derives from the Norse Dyflin, while its Irish name — Baile Átha Cliath — means 'town of the hurdled ford', referencing a shallow river crossing on the Liffey used long before the Vikings arrived. Norse settlers founded a permanent settlement around 841 AD, making Dublin one of the older continuously inhabited cities in northern Europe. The River Liffey still bisects the city, crossed by the graceful cast-iron Ha'penny Bridge (1816), so named because pedestrians once paid a halfpenny toll to use it.

Ireland's literary credentials are extraordinary for a small nation. Dublin has produced four Nobel Prize winners in Literature: W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. James Joyce, though overlooked by the Nobel committee, set his masterpiece Ulysses entirely within Dublin on a single day — 16 June 1904 — which is now celebrated annually as Bloomsday. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin's Westland Row. The city's relationship with language, storytelling, and wit runs deep, from the medieval Book of Kells housed at Trinity College to the literary pubs of the city centre.

Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, is the sole constituent college of the University of Dublin and one of the oldest universities in the English-speaking world. Its Long Room library, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling and ranks of marble busts, houses the Book of Kells — an illuminated manuscript Gospel book created by Celtic monks around 800 AD and considered one of the finest examples of medieval art in existence.

The Easter Rising of April 1916 transformed Dublin and Irish history. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Irish Volunteers seized key buildings across the city, establishing their headquarters at the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. The British Army suppressed the rebellion within a week, and the subsequent execution of its leaders galvanised public opinion behind the independence movement. After the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Irish Free State was established in 1922. Ireland became a republic in 1949 — and today Phoenix Park, at 707 hectares one of the largest urban parks in Europe, contains both the President's residence and a herd of wild fallow deer roaming freely through the heart of the city.