Dublin Travel Guide (Dublin, Ireland)

Around Grafton Street and O'Connell Street, the business of buying and selling rates second only to pub life for vigour, humour and sheer panache. Although many of the store chains - Next, Marks & Spencers, Waterstones - will be familiar to British visitors, the relatively small size of the city means that shopping in Dublin is as much about seeing, being seen and socializing as it is about actually purchasing anything, making it both a spectator and participant sport of the highest order. The O'Connell Street area represents the more ordinary, high-street end of the market, with cut-price shops, chain stores, and a boisterous street market concentrated on nearby Henry Street. Clery's, the august department store, and Eason's bookshop are two of the highlights; the Ilac centre, behind Moore Street, is probably the nadir.

South of the river are the smarter outlets and the tourist shops, as well as the kaleidoscopic and rapidly changing range of "alternative" boutiques that characterizes the fashionable Temple Bar area (the place to go for club gear and street fashions). Pedestrianized Grafton Street contains Dublin's swankiest department store, Brown Thomas. Just off Grafton Street, the two hundred-year-old Powerscourt Town House has been converted into a covered mall, with plenty of expensive clothes shops.

As a visitor, you'll find it difficult to escape the range of shops touting "typically" Irish goods aimed at tourists, mainly wool, ceramics and crystal. You may well come away with the impression that these are universally depressingly overpriced, but there are some exceptions, and you can occasionally pick up some real bargains.