To a casual visitor departing Dublin City centre, as the rows of Georgian and Victorian homes give way to the monotony of suburbia, the imagery of Green Ireland slowly recedes into the memory of the tourist brochures. Dominated by the ageing stock of standardized housing, the typically provincial 1960s Northern English architecture is reinterpreted in bricked and pebble-dashed rows of homes haphazardly snaking across the landscape. The entire architectural language of Irish suburbia can be compressed to just two expressions—a dormer bungalow and a pitch-roofed box. The social order that abhors any attempt at transgression makes certain that nothing passing the local planner’s desk disturbs its aesthetic tedium. (Download full essay PDF) Dr Constantin Gurdgiev is an Economist with Trinity College, Dublin and University College Dublin, and Editor of Business & Finance.