  In this note we discuss dual pairs in Dirac geometry. We show that this
notion appears naturally when studying the problem of pushing forward a Dirac
structure along a surjective submersion, and we prove a Dirac-theoretic version
of Libermann's theorem from Poisson geometry. Our main result is an explicit
construction of strong self-dual pairs for Dirac structures. This theorem not
only recovers the global construction of symplectic realizations from
[Crainic-Marcut 2011], but allows for a more conceptual understanding of it,
yielding a simpler and more natural proof. As an application of the main
theorem, we present a different approach to the recent normal form theorem
around Dirac transversals from [Bursztyn-Lima-Meinrenken 2016].
