Traveling In Style : Portrait of the Dartist : On the DART, Dublin’s State-fo-the-Art Rapid-Transit System, a Mystery Novelist Tracks Down Ghosts, Crosses Paths With James Joyce and Discovers a Side of the City That Tourists Rarely See

You’ve heard of San Francisco’s BART--Bay Area Rapid Transit. But if you’re thinking of traveling to Dublin, you should learn about DART--or, as it’s known locally, the DART--Dublin Area Rapid Transit. A modern high-speed system built partly along the path of the world’s second-oldest railroad, it’s one of Europe’s great sightseeing bargains.

For three punts, or Irish pounds, per person (about $5), you can buy a day ticket, enabling you to travel from one end of Dublin Bay to the other, getting off and on to wander around the neighborhoods that constitute Molly Malone’s home city. You can walk in the footsteps of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Jonathan Swift, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. Best of all, if the weather permits (which it does on occasion), you can begin to realize that Dublin Bay offers one of the most charming vistas in the world, a part of the beauty of Dublin’s fair city that neither the tourist board nor the tourists themselves seem to have discovered.

I was introduced to the DART when a fellow priest suggested we ride it to Howth, at the north end of the line, while we talked about a research project we were working on. During the journey, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the scenery along the bay. I decided that I had to come back when there was no sociology to discuss. Later, when the novel I was writing required my hero to meet someone in an isolated place, I rode to the other end of the line, to the town of Bray, to find an appropriate pub for the encounter. (I chose one called the Harbor Bar.)

The DART cars are state of the art, as modern as those in any city. But much about the system is uniquely Irish. For one thing, they don’t come out and tell you that putting your feet on the seat across from you is forbidden. Not at all. Rather, a sign observes, with typical Irish indirection, “Seats are not for feet.” And they don’t leave unsold advertising spaces empty. Instead, they fill them with poetry and historical observations. Is there a rapid transit system anywhere else in which you can read a Browning sonnet as you go along? Or learn that when the Dublin-Kingstown railway opened in 1832 (only England’s Birmingham-Manchester line, finished in 1830, is older), it took 19 minutes to ride from the Westland Road (now Pearse Street) Station to Dun Laoghaire--and that today, after 160 years of progress, you can do it in 17 minutes on a high-speed DART train?

Let’s imagine that we’re riding north from Lansdowne Road toward downtown Dublin. Maybe the car is crowded with young people carrying notebooks, bound for Trinity College. The scenery along the first part of the route, from Lansdowne to Pearse Street, can be a bit dull, especially on a rainy day--TV antennas, the backs of row houses and church steeples, mostly Church of Ireland (Anglican). One of these steeples houses a bell that tolls all night on the hour--but it always gets the hour wrong.

If we get off at Sandymount Station, we’re in Ballsbridge, a neighborhood of elegant homes, the American Embassy, Jurys and the Berkeley Court hotels and the buildings of the Royal Dublin Society--whose annual horse show is a social event of enormous importance. Even the Irish War for Independence and Civil War (1918-1923)--the “Troubles”--didn’t stop the show.

On the other side of the DART, just before it crosses the Dodder River, an occasionally rambunctious tributary of the Liffey, are Ringsend and Irishtown--the latter so-called because it was where many of the “mere” Irish lived when the Anglo-Irish dominated Dublin. The streets are narrow and the row houses, built early in the last century, tiny. Many of the residences close to the banks of the Dodder have been gentrified and have BMWs and Mercedes parked out front. But a few streets inland, similar houses belong to the Dublin poor.

If we stop at Pearse Street Station, we can more or less sneak in the back door of Trinity College and watch students playing a weird game with a soccer-ball-like object--Gaelic football. Many more of them, though, may be seen dashing from class to class or off to the library, as if desperately seeking knowledge and wisdom. The Irish are in love with learning. Three out of 10 young people now go on to higher education, and most graduate. Alas, there are not nearly enough jobs for them, and many of these intense young men and women must emigrate.

Back on the DART, we are whisked across the Liffey, catching a glimpse of three remarkable buildings on the north bank: the legendary and elegant Custom House (burnt to a shell during the Troubles and later faithfully restored); the glass-and-steel Trade Union building, Dublin’s only skyscraper (built on the site of the old Union Hall, from which the Citizen Army marched during the Easter Rebellion in 1916), and the brand-new, glittering Financial Services Center, from which Ireland hopes to carve itself a place in world trading markets. Much of Ireland’s past and present--and hopes for the future--are tied up in those three buildings.

To visit the strand, or beach, at Clontarf, we’d get off at Killester Station, the first stop north of the Liffey after Connolly Station, and walk down to the water’s edge. Here, on Good Friday in 1014, Brian Boru and his allies defeated the Danish army--thus, according to popular Irish history, ending the “Danish Threat.” In fact, as the descendants of the Danes will tell you, there were more Irish soldiers on the Danish side than on Boru’s. To them, Boru is “a bit of a traitor.” In any case, the battle here was the last major encounter between the Irish and the Danes, after which the latter settled down to become as Irish as anybody else.

The strand at Clontarf is also quite possibly where James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” sees a young woman after his Jesuit retreat and is swept up in a reverie simultaneously religious and profane: “Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. . . .”

Walking back toward Killester Station on the Clontarf Road and crossing the railroad tracks, we find Marino Crescent, an 18th-Century housing project where three famous writers once resided: Oscar Wilde, who lived at 1; William Carleton, the now out-of-fashion author of such novels as “Fardorougha the Miser” and “The Squanders of Castle Squander,” who settled at 3 after walking to Dublin from County Tyrone, and Bram Stoker, author of “Dracula,” who resided at 15. Vincent Caprani--himself something of a romantic writer as well as author of the indispensable manual “A View From the DART”--would have us believe that we might encounter ghosts of all kinds if we wander into Marino Crescent late at night. One of Caprani’s ancestors, by the way, rates a mention in Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Cuprani too. Printer. More Irish than the Irish.” If you read “A View From the DART”--it’s well worth its price of about $2.40--you’ll soon see that what Joyce wrote about his “Cuprani” applies to Caprani as well.

If we travel two more stops to Raheny Station and walk to our right, we come upon the striking artificial strand of Dollymount, a spectacular beach. On the way back to the station, we might wander through St. Anne’s Park, admire the rose gardens and perhaps find Furry Park House, where Michael Collins--military leader in the War for Independence and the man who, as much as anybody, finally drove the British out of most of Ireland--would sometimes hide out when he was on the run. After his death at Beal na Blath in Cork, only a few miles from his home at Clonakilty, his staff found a ring with more than 100 keys--all to safehouses where he could hide while dodging British troops.

As the DART approaches its northern terminus at Howth Head ( howth comes from the Danish word for “head,” so in effect its name is Head Head), it crosses the low strand connecting Howth (once an island) to the mainland. Here, near what is now Sutton Station, Jonathan Swift often rode horseback while visiting friends. It is a nice place on a sunny day--reminiscent of Italian beaches, according to one 19th-Century writer--with the whole of Dublin Bay spread out before you. But if you like to walk amid lovely scenery (assuming that it isn’t raining), don’t get off at Sutton; ride on to the end of the line. Howth itself is something special.

From Howth Hill, on a clear day, it is possible to see not only Bray Head at the other end of the bay but also the mountains of Mourne to the north and perhaps even the Snowden Range across the sea in Wales. You can, if you’re crazier than I am or have mountain-goat blood, walk the cliffs. Or merely climb the steps up to the old town and explore its narrow streets, the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey and the few stones left from St. Brigid’s Church.

The Howth family were Normans and quite Irish by their own standards, but at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, they were thought by the real Irish (who lived to the west) to be on the side of the British. When the great Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley stopped at Howth Castle at day’s end expecting hospitality, the gates were slammed in her face. Not a woman to be trifled with, O’Malley kidnaped the son of the lord of the castle and returned him (none the worse for wear) after extracting from his lordship the promise that the gates would never again be closed to a guest seeking hospitality at the end of the day. The promise has been kept ever since. It is said that even today an extra place is always set for supper at the castle, in recognition of the promise. I wouldn’t recommend that we claim a meal here, however--unless we have a crowd like O’Malley’s with us.

The harbor at Howth, with its yachts and fishing boats and its Victorian-style hotels lining the road above the water, is as pretty as the rest of the place. On the aforementioned sunny day, with the gossoons and the colleens dashing about, it looks rather like a little Italian village--if you can ignore the green Aer Lingus planes overhead, on approach to Dublin International. It isn’t so Italian, though, that you won’t need a sweater.

In the summer, it’s possible to take a boat out to Ireland’s Eye. This island off the coast of Howth boasts a ghost--that of a young woman said to have been drowned by her husband on an excursion to the place--and a Martello Tower. Martello Towers, named (in corrupted form) after a prototype on Cape Mortella on the island of Corsica, are squat, ugly little forts that look like butter churns turned upside down. Built around the coast of Ireland by the British in the first decade of the last century to protect against Napoleon, they have walls of Wicklow granite eight feet thick and flat tops on which signal fires could be lighted. There are 21 around Dublin Bay alone, and their construction doubtless provided employment for many Irish Catholic laborers--who probably would have been better off if Napoleon had invaded. (It’s hard to believe the structures would have deterred him had he given it a try.)

Continuing our fantasy journey, we might head back to Lansdowne Road, postponing a trip on the southern leg of the DART until tomorrow. On the other hand, if the weather’s good, a rare enough occurrence, we shouldn’t push our luck. We could stay on past Lansdowne Station down toward Bray. For much of the ride, the strand is on one side of the train, and parks or golf courses (I count five of these on the line) run along the other. The scenery is quite spectacular.

We could get off the train at Sydney Parade Station, where Emily Sinico died in Joyce’s story “A Painful Case,” in “Dubliners.” We might bring the book along and read the story on the station platform and picture the poor, passionate woman, too much of the drink taken, crushed by a train. We won’t try it on a gloomy day, however.

We might also want to disembark at Blackrock to visit the strand, where there has traditionally been one section for the family and one for men only--where hearty souls can swim and sun au naturel. Not long ago, Irish feminists (also unclad) integrated it, causing one Irishman to remark to the BBC, “Here it is the anniversary of the French Revolution and, sure, hasn’t the last bastion of freedom been breached?” After considering the strand from a safe distance, my own sentiment is, they’re welcome to the cold, stony place if they want it.

If you’re riding the DART on a weekday, a large crowd of young people will get off at Booterstown Station. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Booterstown was the outer limit of the proverbial “Pale,” beyond which the Irish lived, secure from Anglo-Norman rule. It is today the site of a wildlife preserve and of the house, now a museum, of the great Irish tenor Count (a papal title) John McCormack.

The young people, though, will board a shuttle bus over to the new Bellefield campus of University College Dublin. UCD was founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman, the great 19th-Century English theologian and convert to Roman Catholicism. In the Georgian building now called Newman Hall, the future cardinal gave the lectures that later developed into “The Idea of a University Defined.” Over the decades, UCD has educated, first in small numbers and then in large ones, the Catholic professional class that is the hope and strength of contemporary Ireland--or would be if there were enough jobs for its graduates.

Beyond Booterstown, we come to Dun Laoghaire and Sandycove, both of which I strongly recommend. Dun Laoghaire means the “Fort of Leary,” Leary being the Irish king faced down by St. Patrick. But when the British were running Ireland in the early part of the 19th Century, they renamed the place Kingstown--in honor not of Leary but of fat, foolish George IV, who had paid it a brief visit. When the British finally left this part of Ireland in the 1920s, the Irish promptly changed the name back.

There are few places in the Dublin area where it is as much fun to walk as Dun Laoghaire, both on the harbor wall and along the streets, where William Makepeace Thackeray also once strolled. The harbor is one of the town’s great attractions today, along with its elegant row houses. From here, ferries depart for Liverpool, England, and the Welsh island of Holyhead, and there are three yacht clubs--the Royal Irish, the Royal George and the National. I once asked my friend Paddy Dowling, as we set forth from the Royal George, why such imperialistic names were tolerated, especially in view of the town’s history. His answer: It gives the people who ride the boats a good laugh.

Sandycove is the site of a Martello Tower--the one where Stephen Dedalus and his friend Buck Mulligan live in “Ulysses.” Joyce himself spent only a week in the tower, the home of his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty--but it was long enough to provide the memories from which he constructed the beginning of his groundbreaking novel. Gogarty’s tower, now a Joyce museum, is about a 15-minute walk from Sandycove Station. (Two other famous residents of Sandycove were George Bernard Shaw and Sir Roger Casement, the latter a writer and revolutionary who was hanged by the British on charges of treason in 1916.)

One last stop worth making before Bray is Dalkey--a picturesque old town whose attractions include the ruins of a once-mighty Cistercian monastery, a point called Sorrento (because of the supposedly Mediterranean-like view it offers) and a population of painters trying to capture the scene in just the right light. Vincent Caprani makes much of the time Shaw spent in Dalkey while his mother was “carrying on” with the family piano teacher. He does not, however, mention the dazzling if eccentric Irish genius Brian O’Nolan--alias Myles na Gopaleen, alias Flann O’Brien--whose books include “The Dalkey Archive” (in which the author interviews such worthies as St. Augustine and St. Paul in caves by the seaside) and “The Third Policeman” (in which O’Nolan claims that Joyce did not die in Trieste but came back to South County Dublin, worked as a bartender in a public house, wrote pious tracts for a Jesuit magazine and repudiated all his earlier work).

With playwright Brian Friel, O’Nolan is surely the greatest Irish writer since Joyce. He once dedicated a book to his guardian angel, “in the hope that when I go home, he will assure the proper parties that I was only joking.” A falling-down drunk on the 1 bus to Dublin most mornings toward the end of his life, O’Nolan went home all too soon--dead at 50 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Bray is the southern terminus of the DART and the system’s only station outside County Dublin. The Dublin-Kingstown rail was extended to Bray in 1853, and the town quickly became the most fashionable resort for Dubliners--Protestants and the so-called “Castle Catholics,” the ones who achieved a modest prosperity under the rule of the English ensconced in Dublin Castle.

Bray is my favorite stop, not as pretty as Howth perhaps, but far more romantic. With its mile-long esplanade, its snug little harbor, its wide strand, its Edwardian terraces and Victorian hotels, the town has just the right mix. The last time I visited, I was charmed by a small temporary amusement park on the esplanade above the strand, to which hundreds of families had swarmed on a suddenly sunny Sunday. As I watched mothers and fathers frolic with boys and girls, I wondered not whether there was another country whose parents loved their children more, but whether there was one whose parents had more fun playing with their children.

I hope they’re there again when you ride the DART down to Bray yourself. You’ll find no better symbol of what Ireland is all about.

GUIDEBOOK: DUBLIN BY DART

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Dublin, but British Airways, American Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Airlines all fly nonstop from LAX to London, and there are frequent connections on to Dublin on Aer Lingus, Ryanair and British Midland. Aer Lingus also offers daily flights from New York to Dublin via Shannon International Airport.

Where to stay: Author Greeley’s favorite hotel is Jurys Hotel and Towers, Northumberland Road, Ballsbridge (for reservations call 800-843-6664), which he especially likes for its indoor-outdoor swimming pool. He also recommends the elegant Berkeley Court, Lansdowne Road, Ballsbridge (for reservations call 800-448-8355; reservations also available through Leading Hotels of the World, 800-223-6800), and the smaller Westbury, Grafton Street (for reservations call 800-448-8355 or Leading Hotels of the World).

Riding the DART: Fares vary according to distance, from about $1 to $5, but there are bargain-priced daily tickets available for about $5 per adult, $2.60 per child and $7.25 per family. These tickets allow holders to get on and off the trains at will, day and night.