“Take your umbrella, just in case”, was the wise advice given me by the young hotel clerk. Indeed! As we headed into the street in central Dublin, a light rain–more a mist–was falling. Of course it is never as bad as we imagine or remember. During my three-day visit, rain always seemed to be falling, yet the long stretches of warm sunshine surpassed the periods of rain.

It just seems to rain a lot in Dublin. Yet the city has less annual rain-fall than Toronto while Montreal’s rain-fall tops even that. We won’t mention Vancouver!

We hailed taxis a lot. They quickly got us through the clogged centre of Dublin to our destinations which always seemed far off on the other side of the traffic-jams. Taxis gave us more than an easy, quick lift to our destinations.

From the rear seat they provided a slice of Dublin life, a view of the city without the hassle and jostling about with other pedestrians on the narrow “pavements”.

What an articulate lot Dublin taxi drivers are! In every way they are superb dispensers of common sense. Local and international politics, Dublin life, the weather (“dreary”, one driver assured us, although the sun was shining brilliantly from a cloudless sky), national and European finances, the English, the Americans, the “fickle” French, as another driver muttered as he unloaded about Europe, and on and on, any and all subjects were commented on whether solicited or not.

Nothing was untouchable. Religion and the Catholic Church got side-swiped a few times, but as one young driver confided to us, “My wife still attends Mass. But I leave all that to her. She’s better at it”. Perhaps so, but at heart Dubliners are still a religious people even if their church-attendance has fallen off rather noticeably in recent years.

Though not my first visit to the city, I was enchanted again with its beauty, its gentleness, its unchangeableness. Crowded it is, with too many double-decker buses lurching about, tourist coaches blocking the narrow central streets, cars and small delivery trucks inching about, each trying to use the other’s space.

Thus the joy of being in a taxi! They know their way around the bottlenecks, and move away into the lovely Georgian Squares and along the lengthy side-streets. There it all changes.

Even viewed through a taxi’s window, one senses a city mature in its skin. “Dublin,” someone once observed, “is what London once was”, a city of well-preserved eighteen-century buildings and houses whose facades are adorned with gorgeous entrances and delightful fan-vaulted windows.

Dublin has its share of contemporary buildings, of course, many of exquisite design sitting comfortably among their Georgian neighbours. Yet, it is the old squares and the side-streets stretching away from the central area, each with its wonderfully painted doorway and van-vaulted window that sticks in the memory. These give Dublin that unchangeable appearance from one generation to the next.

I first visited Ireland and Dublin over forty years ago. Much has changed, from a rather poor, not so scrubbed-looking country, to one which, however the economy has now slackened–a point endlessly made by taxi drivers–exudes confidence and prosperity.  No longer are there so many poor country-cottages or horse-carts, hay-rigs and rickety cars.

No longer is there the possibility of seeing what we did in August 1970 when we stopped for lunch in Limerick on our way to Kerry. While entering a small café, we noticed a car stopped at the red light. In it sat a woman and a man in the front while, on the back seat contentedly looking out at us, was a rather large pig! It was market-day. Porky was on his way to be sold. Later, after returning to England where I was living, I mentioned this incident to an Irish priest in Co. Durham. He expressed no surprise. That was, he said, the “easiest” way to get animals to town.

Indeed, Ireland has changed and, despite its lovely unchanged squares and side-streets, Dublin too. And for the better, however much our taxi drivers lamented the changing times.