Dublin, Ireland
I just got home from a long weekend Dublin, Ireland, which was awesome! Ace (the bf) and I spent four days in downtown Dublin sightseeing and hanging out with the Irish. Dublin is a great city to be a tourist, because it's surprisingly small enough that most everything you want to see is within walking distance, and its full of great shops, beautiful old buildings and cathedrals, and little local hangouts full of really friendly people.
I have to admit, though, it was hard to be vegetarian in Ireland! The Irish are the epitomy of meat and potatoes folks, and they don't seem to spend too much time worrying about eating their fruits and vegetables. I mostly survived on french fries (chips) and Guiness while I was there, not that this was really anything to complain about. Ace and I did try to do the tourist thing and stick to the traditional looking Irish pubs, which probably didn't help my cause. We saw a number of restaurants offering different kinds of cuisine (we saw a great looking Mongolian Barbecue place in Temple Bar), where it probably would have been much easier to find vegetarian options. That being said, I did manage to find a few vegetarian dishes at the places we went.
We stayed in the Hilton Dublin, and there was a bar and restaurant right next to our hotel called The Barge. We didn't actually go in until the last day that we were there, because it looked like just another little pub on the corner. We stopped in on our last day there to grab lunch, and were surprised to find that the place was actually huge inside, and offered all kinds of food. There were at least three stories inside with bars on each one, and there was also a cafeteria style section with hot food, what appeared to be a coffee bar, and an area serving soups and sandwiches. We went to the soup and sandwich area where I ordered an "egg mayonnaise" sandwich and cauliflower soup. It turns out that egg mayonnaise in Dublin means egg salad, and the egg salad at the Barge was good. I got egg salad, lettuce, tomato, and cucumber on white bread, which was pretty basic but exactly what I wanted. The cauliflower soup was really good, very rich and comforting. 
The waitress told me that the soup was vegetarian when I asked, but I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't made with chicken broth, unfortunately. I'm not one to worry about this all that much (it's not like it's going to kill me if it was chicken, after all), but this is definitely one of the hazards of eating out as a vegetarian - there are sometimes hidden animal derived ingredients in what you order in food that appears to be vegetarian. You just have to decide to either be vigilant about asking your server what goes into the food you're ordering, or you have to decide that you're just not going to worry about it.
The Veggie Bacon Verdict:
The Barge worked out okay, but finding anything vegetarian in Ireland is hard! Be prepared to check several different restaurants, and look for places that offer choices other than traditional Irish fare.
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