City of welcomes?

Ireland is famous the world over as the land of a thousand welcomes, a place where people are always pleased to see visitors, especially ones keen to spend plenty of money. Many such tourists enjoy an Irish welcome on a trip to Dublin, Ireland's capital. What visitors may not appreciate is that Dublin is less welcoming to Irish people arriving from other parts of the country. These people from outside Dublin (known as "culchies"), are subjected to varying kinds of discrimination and hostility from capital's natives. In fairness, some of the "culchies" bring their fellow into disrepute through petty criminality or displays of public drunkenness, while it would be hard to say that many of them have made any efforts to integrate into the settled life of the capital. Nevertheless, the rise of particularist sentiment among the capital's natives is a worrying development, as this recent report on the Culchie Control Platform and its more violent offshoots reveals.



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