Years ago, wearing orange in some areas of Chicago on St.Patrick's day was indeed taken very seriously. I will never forget the look on mother's face when I was 8 years old and she took my 9 brothers and sisters to Mass. I took off my coat and when she discovered I was wearing an orange dress, she looked at me as if I committed a mortal sin. She made me wear my coat for the rest of Mass.

There are a few more beggars in Dublin and to be honest more during the toutist season. Some Romanians have come here not thinking or believeing that they would not be able to work without a permit/sponsor (same as for Bulgaria) and now some of these are begging on the streets but I think they are "professional" beggars and some are Gypsies. There is alo the usual one at the bank machine. I saw a gril recently outside Fallon and Byrne (Near Grafton st) begging on a warm day with a blanket. I go so annoyed as she had nice makeup on dangley nice earrings, and pretty good clothes and did not look homeless just a con.

SiohanP: "There are a few more beggars in Dublin and to be honest more during the toutist season."

I love the typo!

And, of course, in a post where I comment on a typo, I commit one. Here is your missing "b", Siobhan.

"Years ago, wearing orange in some areas of Chicago on St.Patrick's day was indeed taken very seriously."

I have always remarked that Irish Americans are somewhat less forgiving than the Irish in Ireland. Have been given stick in Boston for being British, not a hint of it Ireland.

Twas ever thus with expatriates. Hence all those people who fossilised their view of Britain when they left for the other side of the world in the 1950s and are non-plussed when they come back to find we don't dress for dinner any more and quite like - or indeed often are - black people.

Many of the Irish-Americans who have strong anti-British (or anti-English) sentiment are two, three, or four generations removed from Ireland. Let's be fair-minded here: many Irish-Americans are more temperate.

[I had a little spat with one of the intemperate ones in this group recently.]

I think Waring's observation is connected with Dukey's question.

As someone with an unmistakeably Irish surname and unmistakeably English accent, I've been accused of being a traitor in Boston - by people with fantasies about life in Ireland that couldn't have survived a ten minute Shannon stopover.

It suits - or suited, because surely no-one claiming Irish origin can be ignorant any more of the last 15 year's transformations - a certain kind of Anglophobe to believe Ireland was still locked in a third world superstitious miasma that the English, in some mysterious way, were still engineering.

There's an excellent bibliography on part of how this happened attached to the last chapter of "The Great Irish Potato Famine" by James Donnelly. No anglophile, he (and more clinically, the books quoted) dissects much of the propaganda that's been about for the past century.

flanneruk wrote: "no-one claiming Irish origin can be ignorant any more of the last 15 year's transformations"

They manage, they really do. But many are wrong about the famine, as well.

I am not sure how this fits into this discussion, but on reading about beggars in Dublin I have to wonder how common are incidents such as the one that my daughter encountered last weekend.

She is a university student spending the summer in London on an internship program, and last weekend she went to Dublin. She and two other girls shared a hotel room. As they returned to their room in the evening, they opened the door and found a man hiding behind one of the beds.

The girls ran screaming down the hall as one can imagine and took the elevator to the front desk. The intruder must have taken the stairs and gone out the back way. He had stolen some cash and electronic equipment from the room.

Obviously they should not have left anything in the room, but beyond that it is much more disturbing that they found an intruder. I am just glad she was not alone.

I actually ran away from my encounter, my Irish connections being way too complicated to explain.

Waring, i.e. Waringstown. A delightful spot

Padraig, I am apalled at my spelling as usual. I am a fast and lazy typist sneaking in my posts at work so i do not edit before posting. Most people suffer my posts but i have to laugh at the missing b in yours shame on you! welcome to my life.

Mikki What hotel or Hostel is that. Its must be a hostel if it was that lax and i would be concerned. Can you tell us the name and no it is not common at all here.

Nikki, I'm sorry that your daughter and her friends had such a disturbing experience.

Some of our petty (and not-so-petty) criminals formed a belief that it is better to target visitors in the belief that if they are caught a prosecution might fail because the victim will not be available to give evidence. The police make a particular effort to make prosecutions for crime against visitors successful, and have had some success, to the extent that the risks are probably more evenly distributed between visitors and the rest of us. Much of the petty crime is fund-raising to support a drugs habit.

Crime in Dublin is not high compared with other cities, but neither is it a crime-free zone. Your daughter and her friends were among the unlucky ones.

How did the hotel deal with the situation?

I do not know the name of the hotel. It was not a hostel. The manager said they would investigate. And they gave the girls a different room.

I only found out about it after they had returned to London.

Nikki, that's a pathetic response! And I suspect that there wasn't much of an investigation. Was there no mention of informing the police (generally a good idea if there might be an insurance claim)? Was there any CCTV? Was there any offer of compensation? I suppose you can't answer until after you have been in contact with your daughter.

I think it is fair to post the name of the hotel.

A friend of mine had a coat stolen from a locked room in a Dublin hotel. The CCTV had no tape in it. The hotel paid for a new coat. But he had the advantage of living in Ireland and being able and willing to pursue his complaint.

I KNOW that nobody WANTS to consider this but I cannot help but wondering what that thief would have done if THREE WOMEN had confronted him rather than running down the hall.

Dukey, I would far, far rather my daughter relinquish her cash and her iPod than confront an unknown (or even a known) man who might or might not have been desperate, armed, hopped up on drugs, whatever. My daughter was actually regretting that they didn't leave someone to watch while someone else went to the desk. I am very, very glad that they followed their instincts and ran away.

Believe me, I have considered and reconsidered what that man might and might not have done if confronted. I am very grateful we didn't have to find out.

Wonder away, Dukey. I think they made the better choice. A thief might not be dangerous, but some of them are. A junkie thief can use a syringe as a weapon, and that's a scary prospect.

I will try to find out the name of the hotel and other details.

Back with some details. It is the Comfort Inn City West in Dublin. The police were called and they did come to look at the room, but the kids weren't there at the time.

The reservation was made through Expedia, and the management said they couldn't give the money back for the room until they contacted Expedia, so they had the kids send them the Expedia receipt. I'm not quite sure what Expedia has to do with it, since the hotel got the actual money.

I see that one of the kids who stayed in a different room has written this up on Tripadvisor.