Where to buy a tweed jacket in Dublin

If you’re cool, when you visit Dublin you’ll stay at Morrison’s Hotel. It’s on the other side of the Liffey opposite Temple Bar. The staff are all handsome men and women under 30, dressed in black and universally not Irish. The interior is all white stone floors, horizontal dark wood panelling and low sepulchral lighting. Over the curved dinning room hangs a gigantic sculpture of a male athlete, with a mildly Soviet air about him. The lifts are black outside and in. In the rooms are TVs which are also computers, with a personal welcome message on the screen. There is also a stereo system with an LCD display of the names of Irish radio stations. If you are the sort of person whose sleep is disturbed by too many winking lights the only solution is to unplug the lot. That probably destroys the finely balanced computer programme. Let’s hope so.

You can get into the heart of historic Dublin in a moment or two. Walk along Ormand Quay, past the lovely Winding Stair bookshop, cross the river and into the narrow cobbled streets of Temple Bar. Trinity and the Bank of Ireland are just up the road to the left. They are your first brush with neo-classical and Georgian Dublin.

Head down Grafton Street for the shops. The first stop in search of the Donegal tweed jacket is Brown Thomas. The department store is full of the coolest, cutting edge global fashion brands, Prada, Y3, Gucci etc. Some of the fashion brands are only available in their home towns and, of course, New York, such as the Hong Kong brand, Vera Wang. Hong Kong, New York, Dublin. No tweed jackets here.

Angela says that she remembers her first visit to Dublin. There were no restaurants. Priests and nuns were everywhere. Everyone was small, pale and looked miserable. The centre of Dublin is now one of the most diverse places in the world. Women wearing the hijab, origin not obvious, sit drinking coffee and talking to their friends in Starbucks, gently pushing a baby buggy back and forth in the hope of the child staying asleep a little longer. The buggy is festooned with carrier bags like a Christmas tree. On Grafton Road a Roma woman stands holding her child on her hip next to a big flower stall, not begging, just watching. Young men of various non-white ethnic origins stand with billboards pointing you to Timberland, Guess and other shops just off Grafton Road, lest you don’t spot them. They are busy talking and laughing together and don’t look like they care much whether you see their signs or not. From time to time they give their signs to each other to hold while they answer their mobile phones. So one young man is holding signs pointing to two different shops in opposite directions.

The only nun visible is black and looks like she comes from Africa. No priests are evident on the street, but they are still a part of Irish life. Father Brian D’Arcy told the Irish Times of his concern (apparently shared by many other priests) that the shortage of priests mean that they now have to say several masses a day. As a result their increased consumption of communion wine may take them over the legal limit for alcohol consumption when driving. “I don’t like to use the word wine, as it is the precious blood in the Eucharist, it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream”. Apparently the Vatican bans the use of non-alcoholic wine even if the priests have confessed to being alcoholics.

The great influx of migrants to Ireland (now ten per cent of Ireland's population, mostly arriving in the last decade) from all over the world has left the authorities scrambling to work out the ways and means of identity and integration. The subject is hotly debated. NGOs have sprung up to research, campaign and lobby. Academics are busily researching. Officials in local authorities and the Civil Service have started drawing up plans and strategies to promote anti-racism and equality. They look for ideas and a compass from universities and from other countries. Should they be accepting the new arrivals as new Irish citizens, here to stay, or are they travellers in a global labour market, here today, gone tomorrow? Politicians are wary of the issue, speaking with forked tongue, pointing to economic benefits, talking about the need for fairness and tolerance but also seeking to assuage the fears of more traditional Irish people. They may feel that, whilst much has been gained by economic growth in the Celtic Tiger, something else - durable and significant traditions and certainties - has been lost. Something of the Irish identity is going, perhaps gone. And the loss has been unplanned; a casual destruction. Or perhaps their anxieties and fears are less clearly defined than that, just a feeling that things have changed and the consequences will be unfamiliar and maybe unwelcome. The fear is of the unknown, the different; the feeling that they may become outsiders in Ireland's ill-defined post-modern future. Bertie Ahern's says that immigrants must be 'Irish first'.

From the other perspective, Ireland has at last become a cosmopolitan place, not only because of migration, at peace with freedom, individuality and diversity. The theocratic reactionary past has been discredited and shaken off, and not a moment before time. On this wing of the debate they think that too little has yet changed and too late. The referendum on divorce was divisive. The forthcoming referendum to legalise gay and lesbian civil partnerships promise to make the debate about divorce look like a well-mannered discussion over tea in Bewley’s. And on migration and diversity, they look for leadership which clearly states that diversity is an irreversible benefit, fairness a requirement. Intolerance is unacceptable and will be punished. From both perspectives change has been so rapid that consequences are confusing; destination unknown.

The lovely Bewley’s Oriental Cafe is still there unchanged on Grafton Street, with its beautiful art deco gold mosaics. In the window behind the grinning pumpkins (today being Halloween) are three elderly ladies having tea and a glass of sherry. Why not, even if its’s only 3pm? Behind them are a group of Chinese people having tea. No sign of any tweed jackets for sale anywhere on Grafton Road.

St Stephens Green looks magical with the last of the red and golden autumn trees losing their leaves and taking on the skeletal air of winter. If you come out by the Shelbourne, you can walk down Kildare Street and have a look through the windows at the sleek diners in the Shelbourne’s restaurant. Down Kildare Street are some of the most distinctive Georgian buildings in Dublin. The National Museum and the National Library and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. All are elegant unadorned statements of clarity and symmetry

At the bottom of Kildare Street you come out on Nassau Street, opposite Trinity again. Here there are some Irish souvenir shops. None of them sell Donegal tweed. And then - at last - I spot Kevin&Howland Ltd, an old-fashioned shop containing every imaginable pattern of tweed for men and women. Mostly it’s brown. The outside is painted brown; the furniture is brown and most of the items for sale are brown. The suits and coats are in long rows. Not for this shop is the modern retailing habit of hanging just a few identical black clothes a respectful distance apart from each other and bathing them in sharp white down light. The selection of tweed fabrics is enormous though the styles are rather more standard. The staff are formal and friendly. A trendy, bespectacled, overweight, bald young man is encouraged to think that a pillar box red tweed waistcoat is not too ‘shouty’. Another young male customer is reassured that the floppy ‘Great Gatsby’ cap will return to its original shape after a soaking of Irish rain if you squash up plastic carrier bags and stuff the cap with them until it dries. The fabric I especially like is not available in my size. It appears that virtually every item is unique. I settle on one quite like my original choice, but the pattern is ‘herringbone’ not ‘window pane’. The middle aged man who serves me has a tiny pair of scissors in his pocket to cut away the threads keeping the pockets stitched. If you want a lovely tweed jacket go to Kevin&Howland, but you’d best go soon.

In the National Library is an exhibition about the life of William Butler Yeats. The photo of the poet shows a romantic young man, fine hair flying, with a firm jaw line, a serious expression and a romantic look, his far-sighted eyes behind wire-rimmed lorgnettes. The exhibition has a mock up of his library and the backstage area at the Abbey Theatre, displays of his manuscripts under glass, first editions of programmes for his plays, portraits of Maud Gonne and large backlit photos of the Lake Isle of Innisfree and Coole House. There is also a dark moody photo of his mossy gravestone and his famous epitaph.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

A recording of WHAuden’s In Memory of WBYeats, read by the author, is playing softly in the background. Then a recording of Sinead O’Connor reading Easter 1916.

All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.

see the photos of Dublin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets