This city stinks. That's not a metaphor for any larger state of unrest, corruption or general disarray. It's simply a statement of fact - an awful lot of time, Dublin is terribly, terribly smelly. As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with the sewers and I don't know when somebody last chucked the contents of their chamber pot out of a Grafton Street window on top of me, so that can't be the reason for the pong.
No, the smell seems to be the result of layers and layers of grime and garbage which has been compacted on the streets and walls of Dublin to form a stinky residue. The best example of this is the rash of black spots which adorn every inch of paving slab and tarmac, like a rash of buboes announcing the plague. It's no particular mystery how these particular growths are spread. Not by rats but by lovers of chewing gum who, having got all the flavour out of the gum, spit it out, whereby it serves as a kind of palimpsest or tabloid gossip column, where all the dirt of the town gets constantly written and re-written. It's hardly surprising that these spots are black as black can be.
This general dirtiness is not a new phenomenon - when generations of drinkers and teenagers on school trips reeled out the old favourite, Dirty Old Town, they weren't just singing about the essentially bawdy and ribald nature of the city. They were singing about its filth. Back then, there was an inevitable and understandable love affair between dirt and limited public funds: cleanliness may be next to godliness but not when the coffers are empty. But now that much of Dublin is back on its feet and the country has more money than ever before, the city's general squalor is unacceptable.
I am reminded of the summer I spent working as a maid in Paris when I lived in a room the size of a large cupboard, with no shower or bath. I managed mostly by going to public baths, where I caused many a raised eye and flooded floor in my time.
Down seven flights of stairs, the woman I worked for lived in solitary splendour alongside a bath, a shower and a washing machine, yet not once was I ever instructed to use this last apparatus. It was a long hot summer and every morning at 7.30 a.m., Madame would lie in state and point to the outfit she would like ironed for the day - ironed, never washed. By August, the smell was quite astonishing.
This is not meant to be some general diatribe against the nature of the Gaul, as most of my French friends were at best spotless or, at the very worst, nearly as grubby as me. Madame's odour seemed all the more distasteful, for the fact that she was as rich as Croesus - soap and water don't cost much and certainly a lot less than the flasks of Gio perfume she got through.
Which is kind of how I feel about Dublin being quite so grotty now that we're all blowing off about what a thriving capital city we have. Smelly and poor is unpleasant but atmospheric, smelly and rich is just plain careless.
For me, this is a somewhat surprising diatribe. Not only was I one of those children who would have taken a bath once a year, whether I needed it or not, but I am also generally against any notion of civic order and control. By this I don't mean that I'm all for people digging up daffodils and throwing eggs at old age pensioners, but more that I find the idea of people behaving well of their own accord rather frightening.
On a school trip to Austria, I remember being absolutely horrified by the fact that, faced with a long set of steps in the city centre, everybody ascended on one side and descended on the other. Try as I might, I could not find a sign instructing the good citizens that they must adopt this system: they were just being logical and safe on their own initiative.
They reacted in the same way to the disposal of rubbish - I once happened to be walking behind a man for at least 10 minutes before he popped a cigarette box in the bin and turned back the way he came.
Of course, this is how we should all behave as reasonable citizens, acting on the basis that it's our city and we should look after it. Personally, I'm one of those people who will chase a dropped tissue across four lanes of on-coming traffic rather than litter, but I think that's just because of an abiding memory of my late grandmother putting somebody's dropped Mars bar wrapper back through their car window in a traffic jam. Littering was up there with rape and pillage in my family.
Despite this, I don't think the answer to Dublin's dirt problem is to incite citizens to behave better and neatly pop everything in a bin. You may call this cynicism, but I prefer to think of it as appreciating the anarchic nature of the native Dubliner. People here are just not well-behaved - they are looking for the shortest queue, the quickest way across at the lights, the sneakiest parking place and the shortest way up a flight of steps - and I like that.
Maybe it's the age-old dislike of the class goody-goody or maybe it's because of the pleasant feeling of smugness that descends when you do something civic-minded, but I prefer to live in a society where good behaviour is the result of a fear of getting caught.
Long live the nanny state and let's start looking to the Corporation and the government for an increase in road-cleaning, gum-busting, litter-picking initiatives so that all of us bad children don't have to live in squalor much longer.