Dublin has been dubbed one of Europe's "coolest cities" by German news magazine Der Spiegel.
The Irish capital is a "magnet for the young elite" and, alongside Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Tallinn, is well positioned to profit from what it called a looming "crisis of megacities" such as London or Paris.
"Cool cities are a manageable size, offer security but also career advancement opportunities, they are places with an identifiable elite, innovate enough to manage economic development and prosperity." It described Dublin's 20-year whirlwind transformation from "dirty old town" to a "European metropole of freshly scrubbed red-brick buildings and modern architecture".
"Nowhere can the change be better seen than in the harbour where, 30 years ago, the leading export - cattle - were driven into boats," reports Der Spiegel."Now glass and steel palaces of high-tech companies are lined up one after another."
The magazine credits the transformation on low corporate taxes, social partnership, an emphasis on education and EU subsidies and backs up its thesis with a list of statistics: as many millionaires per capita as in the US and the second-highest average income in the EU.
The Irish capital has "countless pubs and restaurants which contribute to the new liberal flair that gradually relaxed the core conservative Catholicism of the country". The magazine based its choice of cities on a study by Germany's Berger Consultants which rated their attractiveness on their ability to attract a "creative class" of artists, scientists, IT and media people. Some 37 per cent of Dubliners work in these "creative" professions.