It's not often one of your favourite bars makes the news. Electric, a three-story purveyor of fine wines and food in Cork city (try the black pudding burger) has scored a coup after a picture taken on its riverside balcony was used in a Ryanair advert in a French newspaper and labelled as Dublin.

Eagle-eyed students of geography will have noticed that Cork and Dublin are different places, separated by 160 miles and centuries of mutual suspicion, based on Dubliners' refusal to accept that Cork is the better city ("Have you heard about the Corkman with the inferiority complex?", goes the joke. "He thought he was the same as everyone else.").

According to the Irish Examiner, Ryanair deputy CEO Michael Cawley explained the deception. "We know it's a picture of Cork, but there's nowhere as beautiful in Dublin as Cork, so we used it to try and get more French passengers to fly to Dublin."

Cawley is from Cork. As am I.

I could spend the rest of this piece delighting you with the wonders of the People's Republic of Cork – our smiling, clever, children, gentle lilting voices, our rolling hills but I'm going to assume you already know all this. Instead, let's talk about the wonders of Dublin. Follow me, dear reader, as we visit the sights that Ryanair could have used to illustrate the delights of aul' Dublin town.

We begin our journey on O'Connell Street, a delightful 42-lane boulevard/stretch of motorway plonked in the middle of the capital. Marvel at the Ann Summers shop, opened in 1999, truly a harbinger of the Celtic Tiger and all that came with it (Humvees, fake tan and ghost estates). Behold "The Spire", a 398ft needle penetrating the sky; symbol of Dublin's thrusting modernity (or, cynics suggest, the grip heroin holds on some parts of the city). Pop into the luxurious surroundings of Burdocks for a traditional Dublin lunch of chips and tea with brown sauce squeezed into it ("Fuckin delish!" as Dublin's Colin Farrell will tell you).

After lunch, let's follow in the footsteps of dear old Jimmy Joyce himself, and get the hell out of Dublin as soon as we possibly can.

Joke! (we've got at least another 200 words to go here. Sorry). Let's instead seek out Dublin's famous literary landmarks. Or, as we call them in the rest of the country, pubs. Here's the corner where Brendan Behan drank himself to death! And over there is the barstool that Flann O'Brien sat on every day, drinking himself to death.

Moving on, here's the canalside bench where Patrick Kavanagh sat and composed his greatest work, God Dublin's Grim But At Least It's Not Monaghan.

And what about the Dublin of today, you ask? We know what you mean, but we couldn't find a red-haired freckled scamp on a piebald horse at short notice so you'll just have to pretend. We can Photoshop it later if you like.

Disappointing, I know. Let's drown our sorrows at the Guinness brewery! Trips here are mandatory, after the government sold the country to a giant multinational brewing company in 2002.

The "hop store" bar at the St James Gate brewery now towers over the city like Mordor, reminding the residents below to pay fealty to the god Diageo. Each year, on "Arthur's day", Dublinards sacrifice their youth to the fearful brewing deity in a desperate bid to ensure a decent craic harvest for the following year.

Speaking of craic: "See y'all in Copper's!" cried Dublin's Gaelic football captain as he lifted the Sam Maguire All-Ireland Champions' Cup in 2011, so let's follow his advice and head there now. We probably won't get in anywhere apart from Copperface Jack's, Dublin's premier "nite spot" for student teachers, off-duty Gardai and other rural types drawn like freckly moths to the metropolis. The music policy – The Proclaimers' 500 Miles, followed by Van Morrison's Brown-Eyed Girl, followed by The Proclaimers' 500 Miles – has stayed unchanged for years now, as has its dress code: check shirts for boys, Gaelic football jerseys for girls. By now, we should probably accept that we're quite drunk. I can tell because Dublin's started to look pretty. Admittedly it's dark. And I can't stand up. But hey! We may be in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, as a Dubliner who moved to London as soon as he could put it.

That concludes our tour for tonight. Tomorrow, we take the earliest train to Cork. Where we can have lunch in that lovely riverside bar you saw in the advert. A black pudding burger will never have tasted so good.