Sadly, Dublin is more commonly represented, at least on her streets, by track suited dole jockeys asking you for “A yooroo fore de boos, bud”, women with surgically attached babies and a mouth of gold gnashers accosting you at ATM’s and looking over your shoulder, and skanger couples shooting up (individually, or each other) on the Luas.

Garda vetting is obviously necessary, but so is a collective facing up to and tackling of these problems by groups such as the ones who come up with what are good and well intentioned ideas, like this one.

This is fantastic news. We really need to show tourist how great this city is. Let’s face it we need the money. Its high time we released our treasured weapon that we lost in the Celtic tiger era. Our Irish charm & our great sense of humour!

Jeeze get yerself a sense of humour there Bertie Ahern Finn/O’Reilly, I’ll be cribbing and moaning as long as people are being horsesh*t in this country. The entire state has become one big marketing campaign with little to back up the hot air. What for instance, have two silicone enhanced red heads in leprechaun tee shirts got to do with the real Dublin? So perhaps there are a few more armed gangs around these days, and rich americans make easy targets, however, it’s still a good place to visit full of interesting people (while they’re still sober enough to speak) point is, why not just be up front with tourists.
I ‘m not knocking the principle of a welcoming volunteer or whatever, however if I were a tourist coming here to meet a Dub, I’d be looking to meet Brendan Behan not Brenda Bosom – that is, unless we’re planning on becoming the city of a thousand lap dances. Behan incidentally wouldn’t have cleared the Garda vet checks.

City of a thousand tiger kidnappings more like …while the Gardai are farting around on this nonsense.

@ dave finn

I don’t know how much you have travelled Dave but if you have ever been in a large number of major European capital cities, for example Berlin, Helsinki and even Amsterdam (outside the red light area) you should have seen that there is NONE of the behaviour that is tolerated on Dublin streets.

However you will find junkies, beggars, roma, etc in some eastern capital cities behaving the same as the uncultured peasants that we seem to cherish in Dublin

Emmm, the truth it is generally is worse here.

Street law and order here is almost as bad as britain, the difference being their police forces are more proactive in how they deal with it

In many ways it seems we are still the uncultured peasants we always were, except for a few years the peasants had money – resulting in abominations like gerald kean, the dundrum centre and the nonsense of the concept of an ‘Irish celebrity’

And naively, we love to think tourists love us cos we cuddly and we talk a lot and we get drunk really easily……

I will say that yes, our city needs a clean up. But lets not go crazy about its perceived faults. Scum in other cities just happens to be better dressed…. But its still there.

Fair play to ambassadors, feck de begrudgers

Over the last 2 years especially Dublin has just gotten pretty manky. Today in the space of 10 feet on D’Olier street I saw a guy shooting up, another guy urinating while drinking a can and just avoided stepping in a pool of vomit and about 20 spits. I would put it on a par with parts of Delhi…although Delhi wouldn’t appear to have the same blatant drug problems.

The gardai need to earn their wage by dealing with assaults and keeping a visible presence on the street, especially at night. They don’t need more paperwork to keep them occupied.

Too much mutually exclusive thinking going on here.

This initiative is a brilliant idea. Anything that improves the experience of our customers (tourists) and makes them talk Ireland up is to be welcomed.

At the same time we do have a lot to be dissatisfied about. A New York approach to cleaning up our streets would be a great first step.

We need both.

What we do not need is a succession of whinging begrudgery.

There’s a thing called the Irish condition. Its the automatic assumption that everything is worse in Ireland than anywhere else. It isnt.

What tourist? Why in Gods name would you want to come here?

‘Gardai farting around on this nonsense’. Another typically enlightened contribution. Yes there is a full-time Garda vetting service and yes it is absolutely necessary, for many obvious reasons if one actually thinks about it. I’m sure Mr Shatter and the commissioner will hardly be sitting down to discuss allocating more Garda staff for this particular task. And what have ‘Tiger kidnappings’ got to do with this post. What relevance has this to the story? You may as well mention any arbitrary topical serious crime. I don’t remember any tourists being the victims of tiger kidnappings lately. Yes there are tiger kidnappings occurring at present, and some culprits are now actually before the courts, but tourists are far more likely to be the victims of theft and assault crime. I don’t know how this system is going to work, or if it will ever be proven to be successful, but surely everyone would agree that it is a prerequisite that these guides ( or whatever they will be called) will be vetted and have no criminal history for obvious reasons.

Great idea – make sure they all know about Loc8 Codes to help tourists find things and the Iphone App point8 which works with Google, Navigon and TomTom Apps