By Steve Bergsman

The Hotel REU Plaza the Gresham was once the grande dame of accommodations in Dublin, Ireland. Everyone from Muhammad Ali to The Beatles to President Dwight Eisenhower stayed there. But rather than celebrating those famous guests, the meeting rooms are all named after the country's most famous writers, hence The Yeats, The Synge, The O'Casey, The Shaw, The Beckett and The Swift. One of its restaurants is called Writers Lounge.

Ireland boasts more famous writers in proportion to its population than any other country, and that includes four Nobel Prize winners for literature: George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Haney.

The only thing Ireland has more of than writers is pubs - and that tradition goes back a long way. In 1759, Dublin boasted 4,000 pubs, and the country's famous writers spent as much time carousing in the pubs as they did writing. Sometimes, like Brendan Behan, the author of "Borstal Boy," drinking themselves into an early grave. Behan famously said, "I'm a drinker with a writing problem."

Other times the pubs were pure inspiration. After all, what is the plot of James Joyce's "Ulysses" but the two peripatetic protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, crisscrossing Dublin one pub at a time.

So it was fairly obvious to me that the best way to get a sense of Dublin's literary history was to drink my way through it. It's possible to spend a fun, if not soused, intellectual evening doing the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, which is run by Colm Quilligan, a good Irishman who wrote the book about Dublin pubs and the writers they've served.

The dreary, rainy night that my wife and I decided to pub-crawl, Quilligan, along with a part-time actress called Sarah, were to lead the tour. Sarah was a good choice because the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl is more like movable theater. The pair lectured, sang Irish ditties and re-enacted snippets of books and plays from the literary denizens of Dublin's past.

Indeed, by the time the 20 or so literary-minded tourists sitting in the Duke pub grasped what the plan was, they had donned bowler hats, become Vladimir and Estragon, and launched into the core of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot."

The Duke, on appropriately named Duke Street, is a little bit more modern, as au current writers such as Booker Prize winner Anne Enright sometimes hang out after a nearby book signing at Hodges Figgis Bookstore. Duke Street has a long history with writers, going back to the late 1800s when Oscar Wilde, then a student at Trinity College, would carouse the street's pubs. There is even a scene on the corner of Duke Street and Dawson Street in Joyce's "Ulysses."

The second stop on the pub crawl is Trinity College, which is associated with many of Ireland's most famous writers, from Wide ("The Importance of Being Earnest") to Jonathan Swift ("Gulliver's Travels") to John Millington Synge ("The Playboy of the Western World") to Oliver Goldsmith ("She Stoops to Conquer").

The college, built in the reign of Elizabeth I of England, should be one of the first stops for any visitor touring Dublin as it is home to the illuminated manuscript called "The Book of Kells," which was created around the year 800 and is the most important tome in Irish history and a national treasure. One only gets to see two pages of the manuscript at a time, but ancillary displays are fascinating.

The book is located in the Trinity College Library, which is important because there is a second area of the library nearly as engrossing, the Long Room, home to 200,000 of the library's oldest books. The beautiful two-story library, adorned with carved wooden balustrades and marble busts atop pedestals, is jam-packed with ancient volumes.

There are numerous displays in the Long Room, usually books with scribbles and writings by famous writers of yore, such as Swift. Two noteworthy objects are one of the few remaining copies of 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic at the start of the Easter Rising and the oldest Irish harp, dating back to the 15th century.

Now back to the pub crawl, which moved to O'Neill's Pub on Suffolk Street, a frequent drinking spot for many modern writers. One habitue was the poet Brendan Kennelly, who was warned by his doctor to quit drinking or he would be dead in a year. He responded: "I had to think long and hard about that because a man can drink a hell of a lot in a year."

O'Neill's seemed like a good spot to have a drink, so I rolled up to the bar and asked, "Do you have a good lager?" The bartender, taking me for a tenderfoot, snarled, "We have about 50 lagers, which one do you want?" I chose a Crean's. As I was leaving, another American leaned over the bar and asked him, "Do you have a lager?" Time to leave.

After a rousing snippet of "Big Jim," a radio play by writer James Plunkett was recited near the Molly Malone statue, we moved on to the last pub of the night, the Old Stand on Exchequer Street, which has been a pub for about 300 years.

In Dublin one can't go two blocks without tripping over a historical reference to one of the city's great writers, but I do want to mention three stops for any literary aficionado. The smallest is the Marsh Library near St. Patrick's Cathedral. It contains 25,000 volumes from the 16th through the 18th centuries and 300 manuscripts. Bram Stoker used to hang out here when he was working on a little book known today as "Dracula."

Second, stop in at the National Library of Ireland, where they often showcase some aspect of the country's literary history. When I was there it had a terrific and very thorough exhibit on the great poet W. B. Yeats, including manuscripts, notebooks and even his Nobel Prize.

Finally, a bit out of the way but well worth the shoe leather is the Dublin Writers Museum, a vast collection of memorabilia relating to all of the great writers of the city, from a signed copy of "Ulysses" to irascible Samuel Beckett's Paris telephone with a button to disconnect incoming calls.

Last year Bob Dylan did not attend the ceremony for the awarding of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett was equally unfriendly to the same Nobel committee back in 1969.

In Dublin they'll drink to that.

WHEN YOU GO

The Gresham (www.gresham-hotels-dublin.com) on the north side of the River Liffey is near the Dublin Writers Museum. The Merrion Hotel (www.merrionhotel.com) boasts numerous bits of Irish memorabilia on the walls, including signed artifacts from famous writers. There is also a statue of James Joyce in the garden.

Dublin Literary Pub Crawl: www.dublinpubcrawl.com

Trinity College Library: www.tcd.ie/library

National Library of Ireland: www.nli.ie

Marsh Library: www.marshlibrary.ie

Dublin Writers Museum: www.visitdublin.com

Steve Bergsman is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.