Professor Aoife McLysaght is Principal Investigator in the Molecular Evolutionary Laboratory and Lecturer in Genetics, TCD. The thing that I find interesting and exciting: new ideas and trying to figure them out. And that works better when you’ve got somebody to talk about it with. You learn from the experience of working with people who are really good. And even though I’m now a Professor in Genetics at Trinity I still feel that this still goes on, that I learn from other people and I really enjoy the interactions that I have. That’s the difference between doing whatever it is you do at home at a desk

4pm. O’Connell St. And it sounds like a Beckett play. Doom and gloom. Sitting and waiting. Waiting. Waiting for customers. “I suppose a fella gets to sit and read the paper all day. That’s what it’s come to,” says Austin Cregan, the third generation of his family to sell papers and magazines on the capital’s main street. Sitting in his kiosk near the Abbey St corner, Austin reaches behind him and takes out a laminated 2008 article from the Irish Times. It’s all about him and his father’s and grandfather’s life selling newspapers from the kiosk. “Read that,” he says to Dublin.ie. “Everything is in that. Excep

When Izzy was little she always said that her favourite thing about being in a wheelchair was that her shoes never got dirty. They looked brand new every day and the lights never ran out in her favourite light-up runners. However, her real shoes were her wheels. I remember we used to decorate her wheelchair for birthday parties and Halloween. We filled them with fresh flowers once when she was a flower girl for a wedding. At Christmas, we used to put tinfoil and lights around the wheels and lots of tiny Christmas decorations for the Xmas family show.

Standing on O’Connell Street looking north, you have to cock your head a little to spot The Gate Theatre’s modest white-lettered sign, which sits high and unassuming over Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Yet there is something of the Grand Dame about The Gate Theatre. Ascend the theatre’s stairs from a city thick with construction, and you enter a cocoon of chandeliered ceilings, and people ‘dressed for the theatre.’ And it might be that the elegant building itself has directed the theatre’s narrative. There is a rare hush of reverence here and it has long been the place to see the great, often camp, classics: Coward, Albee, Williams and Wilde. Seating 371 audience members, the roof seemed to lower and the room seemed to swelter for the humid hysteria of Streetcar Named Desire. And where else but in that compact room could the audience members themselves feel like tense guests at a bad party for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Jane Jacobs, the doyenne of urban planning, believed that the success of any city owed a lot to the “intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes”. She wrote, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers, and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.” But what happens when the residents and strangers are themselves blind to their surroundings, always in a