¡Welcome to Ireland!☘︎
Meet: Dún Laoghaire
By Nicholas Reid
18 December 2025
Forty years ago, my hometown of Dún Laoghaire, a seaside town just south of Dublin, Ireland, was a place known for its harbour views, the People’s Park weekend markets, and evenings spent at one of the local pubs.
But in terms of cultural diversity beyond the familiar Indian and Chinese takeaways on Friday’s common across Ireland at the time, there was little on offer beyond a small ‘ethnic’ aisle in the supermarket, and maybe a foreign language textbook available at the bookshop. For those who grew up here, the town felt picturesque but culturally narrow; a beautiful place, but with limited exposure to the melting pot of cultures you could find in larger cities across Europe
Today, the picture has changed; Dún Laoghaire has grown into a flourishing multicultural community, with residents from Poland, India, Philippines and more. People from all over the world now are beginning to call this place home, bringing languages, traditions, food, and enriching everyday life. The People’s Park markets now have stalls ranging from Middle Eastern mezze to Latin American flavours, pubs now serve gyoza alongside pierogi as the table next to you chats away in Chinese, and multicultural festivals throughout the year celebrate both native and foreign holidays in dance and song.
For me, as someone who has lived in and is studying Japan, one particularly memorable marker of this evolution occurred during the ‘Festival of World Cultures’ in 2008, where visitors were treated to performances by traditional Japanese geisha and maiko, complete with songs, dances, fan art, and musical demonstrations that offered a rare glimpse into centuries-old cultural forms; these performances brought something to the Irish audience that most people won’t even get to see in Japan, highlighting how far the local cultural scene has come in showcasing global traditions on its own stage.
Exposure to different cultures doesn’t just add variety to a town; it expands our imaginations, challenges assumptions, and reminds us of the shared humanity beneath surface differences. In Dún Laoghaire today, these experiences broaden horizons in ways a homogenous environment rarely can.
In a world where debates about migration and cultural difference often get reduced to numbers, headlines or controversies, especially in a country reluctant to accept change or immigration like Ireland, places like Dún Laoghaire stand as examples of what integrated intercultural life can be; not something to fear, but something to embrace.
