O'Connell Street is Dublin's great central thoroughfare, a broad boulevard running north from the Liffey, lined with monuments and pierced by the gleaming 120-metre stainless-steel Spire. At its heart stands the General Post Office, headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising and still pocked with bullet marks, now home to a museum on the rebellion.
Statues of national figures, from Daniel O'Connell to the labour leader Jim Larkin, punctuate the central median. Just off the street, the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street and the surrounding Georgian terraces anchor the area in the city's literary heritage.
The northside around O'Connell Street is busier and more workaday than the polished south of the river, but it is rich in history and well served by Luas trams crossing at the riverside.