I've only stayed in a few hotels in Dublin. It seems kind of perverse to spend money to stay in a city where you already have a roof over your head, writes Róisín Ingle
But when I got the chance to stay at the Shelbourne Hotel recently - the place where the Irish constitution was drafted, and home to the legendary Horseshoe Bar - my friend and I had our overnight bags packed before you could say Eamon de Valera/Dunphy.
The idea of a press trip to your own city is a bit strange, but who were we to argue with the The Dublin City Business Association, which was on a mission to get us lazy city slickers to appreciate the place and stop taking all its delights for granted. There was breakfast in Bewley's on Grafton Street, where we discovered you can get eggs Benedict served to your table in the James Joyce Room by a gorgeous Spanish waiter named Angel.
There was a horse and cart ride, where we discovered the joys of clip-clopping along sober and at a reasonable hour as opposed to locked at 5 a.m. There was a stroll through Merrion Square, where, thanks to Dublin expert Pat Liddy, we discovered the reclaimed antique lamp-posts dotted around the park like exotic trees. There was, according to the itinerary, some "light shopping" in the Henry Street/Mary Street area, where we discovered there is no such thing as light shopping and wished we had an Angel around to carry our bags.
I even saw my first working Luas. (I still haven't decided whether our new tram system should become known as the Jerry Lee or the Daniel Day.) But living in the Shelbourne Hotel for 24 hours was the best part by far. The Saturday before our Sunday in the city was spent relaxing in the hotel room, looking out over St Stephen's Green, which from the fifth floor looks like a miniature Central Park.
The Saturday night was spent recovering from a Cher concert. At one point the woman, God bless her collection of all-in-one body stockings, had come on stage riding a sort of Trojan elephant which she then disappeared down into. She had started the show singing I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, i.e. the shop where sensible middle-aged-lady clothes are sold. It was the most fantastically tacky spectacle we had ever seen. We giggled all the way back to The Shelbourne and, as we went through the famous revolving door, our spirits were high.
The spirits, meanwhile, had been removed from their rightful place in the mini-bar. My friend had come prepared with chicken drumsticks, garlicky olives, chipolatas and Cava. We couldn't fit all that and the miniature vodkas in the fridge, so we got temporarily rid of the expensive hotel goodies. Thanks to our cunning Bring Your Own plan, all we had to order from room service was an ice bucket for the bubbly. We settled in for a night of change-the-world chat and trashy TV.
Which was all very well, except my friend decided that we should buy in a movie from the Pay TV service offered by the hotel. Her theory about this was quite solid. If we were watching something absorbing like, say, Newlyweds or The OC, we wouldn't talk at all and our pyjama party would inevitably poop. If we bought in a movie, she reasoned, we would keep one eye on Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and talk to each other during the boring action scenes. I couldn't really fault her logic. A pay-per-movie it was.
Only it wasn't. Not at first. I don't know what button she pressed, but suddenly every channel featured two nubile young Swedish women, doing things you'd see in a very different kind of pirate movie. I screamed at her to turn it off while she flapped around in a panic, but eventually we had to call down for help from the late-night porter. He arrived with three different remote controls to fix the problem and looked at us suspiciously when we protested that no, of course we weren't interested in that kind of pay-per-view action.
Sure, he said, eyeing the chicken drumsticks, the champagne and the eclectic array of finger food. Sure, he said clocking two unkempt ladies in their pyjamas, the twin beds pushed close together with hardly space for a cocktail sausage between them. Sure, he said, as though he had guessed, correctly, that we had spent the last few minutes taking photos of each other with a digital camera. I'll make sure it doesn't show up on the bill, he said with a smirk, before locating Johnny and Orlando on the telly. Dublin can be heaven, but on balance we think it might be safer to stay home next time.