The mid-morning rain is making Dublin soft and grey once more, and on the big southern approach road into the city an annual benediction is taking place on this feast of Stephen. Dozens of cars are parked head to foot outside the city’s Glasnevin cemetery as Dublin’s living, laden with flowers and memories, bring tributes to their one and a half million dead. Though barely 24 hours have elapsed since the dawn of Christmas day, this will be the only public display of piety we will witness for a while in a city that was once a theme park of religious devotion.

“Ireland no longer puts its trust in the Catholic church,” I am told later that day. Nowhere is this black epiphany more apparent than in Dublin, where the betrayal and denial of the clergy over child sexual abuse was most keenly felt and most probably will never be forgiven.

But what do you do with all that spiritual energy, that desire to be transported beyond earthly concerns? Holy Ireland, and especially Dubliners, it seems, are channelling it all into festivals. There is now barely a day in the calendar when Ireland isn’t observing and commemorating its non-religious culture line by line, stanza by stanza, step by step; in music, verse and play. In the 21st century there is one commodity that Ireland possesses more than churches and that is workshops.

On Tuesday another festival gets under way in Ireland’s capital, encompassing all the shouts and cadences of the modern big festival experience – only bigger, and with memes and tropes all over the place. Jump into Ireland for a three-day gluttony of traditional and popular culture that the city’s sanhedrin is hoping will thrust it into the A-list of festival destinations at new year.

Some of the world’s most dramatic and iconic cities now compete with each other to determine which is best to see in the new year. Millions of tourist dollars are at stake, as well as the prize of being included in the morning news montages all around the globe showing the best of the night’s fireworks displays. Dublin and places such as Amsterdam and Madrid occupy a rung below London, New York and Edinburgh, but it is in that elite company that Dublin seeks to belong.

Last week, Ireland’s minister for tourism, Paschal Donohoe, said the festival “brings with it the opportunity to ring out the old and ring in the new to a greater extent than ever before. It also presents a valuable opportunity to put Ireland centre stage and promote the brilliant things we have to see and do here in Ireland.”

Indeed if you don’t emerge improved from this cultural whole body massage, then it means you’re probably already dead. There’s something called a food village (will it have a Hansel and Gretel cottage?); three-dimensional light projections all over the city; and a spoken-word festival. There’s a procession of light and, on the last day, family and fitness-themed fun-run workshops. The headline act is Kodaline, the anthemic Irish rock band who sound a bit like Coldplay, only awake.

There does seem to be a problem, though one which I’m sure can be overcome: nobody I speak to knows anything about Dublin’s big New Year’s Festival, known as NYF Dublin. In the city’s fabled Temple Bar district, once a bohemian enclave of artists and poets and now Europe’s go-to hen and stag destination, I am slurping Guinness (you can never sip it) in a tavern of many lounges. It’s not yet noon and I’ve counted more than 100 people listening to an ancient and very good folk duo singing about rural injustices and flaxen-haired wantons.

I am joined by Anthony O’Flaherty, a young Dublin artist who makes ceramics and prints and, you would have thought, possesses all the target social and cultural indicators for the new year’s festival. “I’d never heard of it until you mentioned it,” he said. “This city is mobbed in the summer, but I’m not sure I’d want to travel here in the winter.” At Christmas time there is a mass exodus of Dublin residents back to the countryside whence many of them came. “Home to our mammies,” said Anthony.

My taxi driver, Robbie Humphrey, has lived in Dublin for every one of his 36 years. “I’ve not heard of this festival either. And if an experienced Dublin taxi driver hasn’t heard of it, that’s not a good sign,” he said. The young German couple in the smoking area of my new favourite pub are being importuned by a man with the sort of hat and ambience that suggest he’s heading for the St Stephen’s day races at Leopardstown. None of them knows about the NYF either. “We just wanted to be in Ireland for Christmas,” said the couple, “and not in Germany.” Nor is the barman in Fitzsimmons across the street aware of it. “I’d certainly have heard of it by now,” he said dismissively.

If you were being cynical, you’d dismiss the concept as an exercise in trying to hitch Dublin’s coat-tails to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, which, it is reasonable to conclude, has provided the gold standard for the global new year celebration oeuvre. But you’d be wrong. The aftershocks of the global recession still rumble here, though there is a greater mood of optimism than when last I visited. It’s too early yet to glimpse the crest of any waves, but the New Year’s Festival represents, perhaps, a city feeling better about itself and daring once more to order champagne cocktails.

Besides, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay is a one-night only, adult extravaganza built around alcohol, hugely expensive music acts and the musk of sexual adventure. It has become a pagan festival for committed hedonists with a bit of money in their pockets. What Dublin is attempting is something a little less edgy and a little more wholesome, a festival in which entire families may participate. Edinburgh is a boutique city where a bus tour of its main attractions will take up less than a lunch-time. Dublin is a proper metropolis that demands to be studied instead of merely flattered.

Paul Heffernan, of Dublin city council, is delighted with what Dublin’s festival has achieved in the four years since its inception. He makes no apologies for there being many different cultural festivals. “We want our festival to be family-friendly and there is a good reason for that. When they are done right they have the potential to engage people in Ireland’s rich cultural tapestry, people who might not normally attend the theatre or poetry readings or literary festivals. And while there may be some people who haven’t heard of Dublin’s New Year’s Festival, they soon will. Already the concert by Kodaline is completely sold out.”

In February there will be a huge Chinese festival, followed by the Battle of Clontarf festival commemorating one of Europe’s most significant Viking engagements 1,000 years ago. And then, rather gloriously, One City, One Book, in which Dublin celebrates its peerless literary firmament by choosing one book and then, literally, teaching its residents how to appreciate it. In 2015 it’s Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy; in previous years it’s been Dracula, Strumpet City and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. It’s a far more authentic literary event than those where scores of avaricious authors and agents descend like locusts, devouring all restraint, judgment and alfalfa crepes.

Even glimpsed through folds of rain, Dublin still beguiles and you wonder why it feels it needs to sell itself, this city of Joyce, Yeats and O’Casey; of Easter 1916, Phoenix Park and Guinness; of the Abbey theatre and now Google. Not to mention our latterday Peter and Paul: Saint Bono and Saint Bob.