In many cities, it is often assumed that the residential suburbs are not the sort of place in which literary culture thrives.And, indeed, the work of one of the most prominent writers associated with the suburbs of south Dublin – Eavan Boland – has taken this idea as a major theme in her work.However, a closer analysis shows that south Dublin has long had rich literary associations, and it is this intersection of private and public that is the focus of this chapter. It was here that both James Joyce and G. B. Shaw were born, and where W. B. Yeats lived. The area was also a hive of activity during the Irish Literary Revival, whether in the school run by Patrick Pearse, or in the literary salons of George Russell (Æ). More recently, it has been associated with poets such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as with Booker-winning novelist Anne Enright, whose novel Actress provides the chapter with a starting point. Far from being the quiet annex to the boisterous city-centre literary pubs, the south Dublin suburbs have been the site of intense literary activity of many kinds for the more than a century, a place where the intersections of public and private can be explored.

This chapter is in many ways a chapter that reaches interesting abstractions on the nature of power, rights, and of constitutionalism, all in the interests of environmental law. We began with a discussion on Tiebout, who argued that when people with the same preferences cluster together in communities, that competition between local authorities will, under certain restrictive conditions, lead to allocative efficiency. This implies a market in jurisdictions and in states competing in public goods and services. Van den Bergh’s model forecasts a 'bottom up federalisation', wherein the default assumption is that the best level of governance is at the most local level available, unless it is otherwise demonstrable that the particular environmental issue cannot be sufficiently resolved at that level of government. Another point that we addressed is the issue of centralisation, of whether all actors should be required to comply with a singular jurisdiction-wide regulatory requirement to prevent an environmental problem (centralisation), or, should they be allowed to individually discover their own most efficient method of preventing the environmental problem (decentralisation).