These images capture the ambivalence I also feel towards Dublin for many reasons, not least my upbringing. A journey from Belfast which once took three hours on a single lane road - if you were lucky - now takes only one and half on slick motorway roads. I remember passing the huge slogan scrawled on a wall in white paint as you approached the old border checkpoint on the southbound Dublin Road, which read “We will never forsake the blue skies of Ulster, for the grey skies of an Irish Republic”. Yet as a teenager, compared to Troubles-era Belfast, the city of my birth and childhood, I always found the things I loved (music, clothes, records) much more easily here. I was, and am still, seduced by what MacNiece described as its ‘Georgian facades’, the palpable sense of melded histories, more cosmopolitan feel of the shops, and the bar & café culture in the city’s central areas. However Dublin is not my city, and never will be in any real sense, something I was reminded of every time I visited; it felt as much of a foreign city to me as many in mainland Europe, if not less so, because of the confusing love-hate mixture of jealousy, longing, familiarity and strangeness it so inspires in me. I have now made Dublin my home since moving here in 2017: the more places I live, the more I realise that a relationship with any city is inevitably a love-hate one. Dublin itself now navigates an(other) era of darker days; the very heart of the city is being gradually hollowed out by relentless gentrification and greed, spiralling rents, unprecedented homelessness, and the absence of any real and thoughtful city planning that has the citizens of Dublin at its heart.