Chimac, Dublin

Dublin on a Sunday morning has the atmosphere of a theatre after the audience have gone home: the curtains still twitching, the perfume stale in the velvet, the city sheepishly pretending it didn’t spend the previous night face-down in an orgy of Guinness. In England, Sunday trading laws have long since been bullied into submission by commerce and hangovers, but Dublin still clings to a kind of ecclesiastical jet lag. The pubs, those civic cathedrals of stout and confession, seem to observe opening hours designed with the mindset that too much daylight drinking might summon Cromwell back from the dead. And yet religion is only part of it now, more inherited muscle memory than active theology. The delayed pub opening feels less like devotion and more like cultural inertia, one of those antique civic habits preserved long after everyone has forgotten the reason, like saluting magpies or pretending U2 are still interesting. The old licensing laws were unmistakably shaped by a church that…