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sonofstan’s comment about homogenization referred to a perceived “plague” of clothes shops (that’s all there is in the city centre apparently) not the content of bookshop shelves. The point he made was wildly oversated - it is not the case that only clothes shops can afford city centre rents - that’s a problem generally restricted to shopping centres. I saw a lease for a Dame St. restaurant for sale this year for 45k pa - a steal. Its shopping centre equivalent in Limerick is about 250k. And bookshops don’t need to set up on main thoroughfares like that.

The commercial property market is not the same as the residential property market - different zoning practices and use restriction apply for a start. Commercial rents in town are reasonable away from Grafton and Henry Street AFAIK and at any rate most commercial leases for bookshops will have been signed long before the Celtic tigger took off.

As has been pointed out here, the antiquarian market has moved online. And while it’s nice to come across an interesting book in a second hand shop, no matter how many such shops there were in the city, their stock could never represent more than a miniscule fraction of all the books which have been in and are now out of print.

Changes in the Dublin book scene reflect international trends in publishing far more than the short-comings of Irish society.

I hardly think such an assertion is a charter for Harry Potter and McDonalds freedom fries. But obviously others disagree.

Post-colonialists would argue that all the Free State did was embrace a Dublin Castle view of Ireland as full of dragons, not to be trusted, and carried on without even drawing breath. You cant give Paddy - sorry, local councils, - democratic authority ‘cos you won’t know what they might do with it. Best to keep all decisions centralised. What Paddy doesn’t realise, as Winston Churchill once said, is that he’s part of an Empire. and what these bloody councils don’t realise is that they’re part of a State. The Irish Free State: Dublin Castle with a fada.

There is a danger in threads for comments to veer close to personal attacks. When things do get personal then that is contemptible and isn’t tolerated here.

I’m not going to defend any of the comments above. That is up to the people who made them. However, reading Conor’s comment I don’t think that it was so personal to be considered offensive. Cheap point scoring maybe, but for a start he doesn’t know you at all, so he was just reacting to what he perceived to be your defense of the larger bookshop chains. That’s how I read it, Conor might say different. I don’t want this to spiral into a ‘you said this/I said that’ thread.

I hope to hell that dissent is not met with chippy and irrelevant straw men. For a start, I’d like to see more people adding comments and for different and dissenting view points to join in. I don’t think it was in this case.

However, if you’re not going to comment again, your not, and nothing else can be done.

The rest of this comment is going to appear as a post.

One of the reasons I’ve refrained from commenting on posts here has been a suspicion that any dissent would be met with chippy and irrelevant straw men. I assumed it would be reasonable to point out that the analysis of the bookshop scene in Dublin is at least debatable and that therefore hysterical prognostications were somewhat out of place. Alas, it seems that rather than engage the points, you’d rather pretend I only like McDonalds and Harry Potter leaving you free to dismiss my contributions. So I won’t make any more.

Sonofstan’s “point” about city centre rents (which you say didn’t appear til comment 13) was certainly not remotely clear from his hyperbolic initial contribution. My reply was reasonable in the circumstances. Conor’s dismissiveness was contemptible.