Recently I was driving down Dublin quays, from Parkgate Street on to O'Connell Street. Fortunately, it's not a route I need to take often, so I gawked at my surroundings a bit more than usual. Whereas there's been a lot coverage of the Dublin Boardwalk–and the drug addicts who tend to frighten the office workers lunching al fresco–the architectural debacle of the recent construction flanking the Liffey tends to be forgotten. The handiwork of Zoe Developments and other aesthetically challenged property vehicles, the apartment blocks on either side of the river fill the observer's soul with wintry gloom. Such is the tackiness of the blocks that the buildings’ gestures at balconies seem more like grills designed to prevent the occupants from hurling themselves out the windows.

But even my negative reaction to this sham urban regeneration seems cheerfully mellow when compared with the bile gustily unleashed by a character called Vitali Vitaliev in an article on Dublin posted on a site called “Travel Intelligence.”

“From my very first day in the Irish capital, I could clearly see that Dublin in its entirety was not a beautiful place. Even so, having looked down at the capital from the top of the chimney, I found myself thoroughly unprepared for the sight “of unparalleled charmlessness, an absence of grace so total that it was almost the thing of wonder”.

Even the poor, benighted locals get a lashing from the dyspeptic Vitaliev:

“First we shape buildings, and then – buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once famously remarked. And wasn't it the architectural turmoil of Dublin that had eventually “shaped” it into a depressive and largely dysfunctional metropolis, with high crime rate, all-permeating corruption, unworkable transport system and one of Europe's worst dressed street crowds – in short, into a city that is much less attractive than its painstakingly created PR image?”

I think the chances of Mr. Vitaliev getting freelance work from Discover Ireland are looking slim…