TWO weeks ago, something quite sensational happened in the centre of Dublin. On a balmy June evening, under the darkening sky, over 100 people sat down in the middle of a new public square in Temple Bar to watch a movie on a big screen, rolled down over the Box Brownie facade of the Gallery of Photography.
It was an almost surreal experience, sitting in this outdoor room amid all the sophisticated new architecture of Meeting House Square. It just didn't feel like Dublin, or look like Dublin - not the city of "Ah, sure, it'll do", of making it up as we go along, the Dublin of dereliction and decay.
Meeting House Square is the right venue for next Monday's bash to mark Ireland's accession to the EU Presidency, because it is surely the architectural flagship of the Europeanisation of Dublin. For here is a new public place, designed with brilliance and style, where there was once nothing but a surface car park.
Returned emigrants are astonished by the transformation of the city, particularly Temple Bar. They do double-takes on Eustace Street when the bookends of the Arthouse and Music Centre open up to reveal the new curved street. They are amazed by the trick cyclists on Temple Bar Square, the proliferation of cafe-bars and, above all, the buzz.
What is it like? Last summer, when the sun shone every day for seven weeks, it was a bit like Barcelona, and there's no reason to believe this summer will be any different. Nearly everywhere you walk in the city centre, there's something new to marvel at, something to celebrate. Dublin has finally arrived as a European capital city.
There are tower cranes on the skyline, lots of them, but they're constructing hotels, apartment buildings and a huge shopping centre right in the heart of the city, at Jervis Street. As Padraig Flynn once said, at the height of an earlier building boom in the late 1980s, when only office blocks were on the agenda, "the town is hopping".
The whole atmosphere has changed utterly. Remember how bleak it was 1O years ago? Swathes of dereliction scarred the city, even along the Liffey quays. High Street, once the main street of medieval Dublin, was in such a ruinous state that there wasn't even a building left to support the street sign; it was put up on a pole instead.
When a group of us got together to organise the Dublin Crisis Conference in February 1986, nearly everything was going wrong; the authorities could not even be persuaded to acknowledge that the city was in crisis. The road engineers, in particular, seemed bent on clearing away entire historic streets to cater for car-borne suburban commuters.
All we had were our hopes and dreams that, somehow, the city would be saved. Frank Feely's millennium in 1988 (however bogus historically) did help, because it encouraged suburbanites - and that's what most Dubliners are, even today - to rediscover the historic core as a place of fun and recreation, not just somewhere drab to work.
In 1991, when Dublin took its turn as European City of Culture, there was still precious little to show for it; some killjoy official in the Department of Justice even vetoed a fireworks display to celebrate the restoration of the Custom House, on public safety grounds. Had he never been to Barcelona, for example, where fireworks are set off in the streets?
That most European of ideas, living in the city, had only translated itself to Dublin as late as 1990, when the first private residential scheme for nearly a century within the canal ring was completed at Sarsfield Quay. Though some of us always believed it would happen, the speed of its take-off surprised even the shrewdest of estate agents.
Since then, some 5, 400 residential units have been built in the inner city, with a further 2,250 in the pipeline. Most of them, admittedly, are of the shoe-box variety and may even turn into the tenements of the 21st century. But the influx of so many young people into the heart of the city at least helps to reverse its catastrophic population decline.
TAKE a look at Parliament Street. Ten years ago it was so dead that all it seemed to lack was a gravestone to mark the spot. Now it is one of the beneficiaries of urban renewal, with some of the city's trendiest pubs as well as cafes, restaurants and shops. What's more, its footpaths have been widened and re-paved with some elegance.
This has been one of the major successes of the Temple Bar project, the creation of new public spaces in the city. Following the fine example of Barcelona, it shows that architecture or at least, European architecture - isn't just about making slick contemporary buildings, but also about giving something back to a city and its people.
We are fortunate that the younger generation of architects bypassed the depressing insularity of London to work for Renzo Piano in Genoa, the late James Stirling in Stuttgart and other big names in Berlin Paris Barcelona and Seville. And man of them came back brimming with European ideas about what should be done in Dublin.
This is reflected in the new architecture of Temple Bar, in particular. The area, once threatened with having its heart ripped out for a mega-transportation centre, now throbs with activity day and night. It is Dublin's designated "cultural quarter", though visitors might be left with the impression that the pub culture is pre-eminent.
Where else, though, would you find such a wonderful facility as The Ark, billed as Europe's first cultural centre for children cheek-by-jowl with a white-fronted "black box" devoted to rock music? Like so many other developments in Temple Bar, they grew out of the first-ever architectural framework plan for any urban area in Ireland.
Devised in 1991, the plan was unique in taking a three-dimensional look at this crucial chunk of the city - another very European thing to do. And while it hasn't all quite worked out in practice, the standard of the new architecture has been almost uniformly high, winning numerous awards and often quite breathless plaudits from visiting aesthetes.
But the revival of Dublin, and the commitment to architectural excellence, spreads way beyond Temple Bar. Look at the refurbishment of Government Buildings, so bright it glows in the dark, or the spell-binding transformation of Curvilinear Range in the National Botanic Gardens, which is of international significance.
Then, there's Dublin Castle - "the Devil's Half-Acre", as Michael Collins called it. It was the last EU Presidency that finally encouraged a government to undertake a £20 million refurbishment scheme, rescuing the most important group of historic buildings in the city, whatever their historical "baggage", from decades of neglect.
AT the western extremity of the Liffey quays, good things are also happening. The Eastern Health Board led the way, transforming Dr Steevens's Hospital into a headquarters which would be the envy of the Hapsburgs, and now the National Museum is preparing to re-open Collins Barracks as a most commodious annex.
Way downriver, the International Financial Services Centre at the Custom House Docks offers a flashier image of Dublin, plugged into worldwide money markets. And as for the new Cusack Stand at Croke Park, only unreconstructed begrudgers would fail to acknowledge its positive impact on the city's skyline - and the cachet of the GAA.
Dublin Corporation, long the bete noire of conservationists, now talks in their language. It recently produced an imaginative plan for the north inner city, stretching from O'Connell Street to Collins' Barracks, which promises to transform the area - with a fraction of the EU-aided budget invested in the much smaller enclave of Temple Bar.
Since 1990, Dublin has also celebrated the author who did more than most to imprint the city on the map of world consciousness by opening the James Joyce Cultural Centre in North Great George's Street, in a magnificent Georgian house which had once been consigned to the scrap heap. And with it, Bloomsday just gets better and better.
The trams that featured in Ulysses look set to make a welcome comeback, in modern form, after a somewhat shaky start; light rail is also a very civilised, European concept. And we're beginning to follow the example of the Dutch and the Germans by adopting the concept of "traffic calming", almost unheard of here 1O years ago.
But the Europeanisation of Dublin has its downsides, too. Grafton Street is now awash with Euro-trash shops with much of the same merchandise, with yet more multiples queueing up to cash in. And the £6 million invested in turning SS Michael and John's Church into an indoor Viking theme park, much of it EU-aided, could easily have restored St Catherine's and St George's.
Too much of value is still being lost, because the city's historic buildings stand woefully bereft of statutory protection. A recent survey showed that there are no less than 3,820 vacant buildings in Dublin, as well as 147 acres of derelict sites. The streets and some of the new public spaces are as litter-strewn and filthy as ever. Perhaps it's part of what we are.
And let's not forget about vast tracts of housing on the periphery, or some of the more desolate flat complexes within the canal ring, which have hardly been touched by the revival of the city's core; just like the high-rise ghettoes that surround the splendour of Paris, they have not experienced even a trickle-down effect from Dublin's grands projets.
