It's their headline, not ours: "Kick Up The Arts For Ballymun". This is how the Ballymun Partnership announced a clever initiative to get feedback from the community on how people would like their new £5.5 million arts centre developed. It set up shop in a unit in Ballymun Shopping Centre and invited people to register their views on video, on tape, or by drawing, painting or in a questionnaire.

Local artists were also invited to perform.

Ballymun Partnership is now beginning to sift through the huge number of responses and will present a report to McCormack and Pritchard, the consultancy which is developing the arts centre.

The Partnership's Sean Cooke explains that the planned demolition of the flats and regeneration of Ballymun have forced them to broaden their remit, and see the arts as part of a major redevelopment plan: "People have begun to realise that you can't develop unless you have the social and cultural structures in place," he says. The EU money must be spent by the end of 1999, so it looks like an artistic light will shine over the newly-flattened landscape of Ballymun.