The St Patrick's Festival was meant to capture the spirit of a new, more confident Ireland. It hasn't turned out like that, writes Hugh Linehan

Tonight, in Dublin's Smithfield, this year's St Patrick's Festival officially begins. The infelicitously titled GE Money Oíche features the Spanish/Argentian Grupo Puja, who combine acrobatics, circus and choreography, in a futuristic globe 9-15m (30-50ft) above the square.

With its ugly corporate title, its reliance on a southern European tradition of street spectacle, and its setting amidst one of the city's most overblown exercises in "urban regeneration" (Albert Speer would have heartily approved of Smithfield's monstrous redesign), GE Money Oíche is the perfect exemplar of the St Patrick's Festival, which has now grown to become a five-day annual event.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the reinvention of the capital's St Patrick's Day celebrations by a group of talented and energetic individuals under the chairmanship of the Gate Theatre's Michael Colgan. Their stated intention was to remake March 17th as a day of celebration for the people of Dublin.

"I think it's crazy that the moment you say, 'St Patrick's Day parade', some people assume you are referring to the one in New York," Colgan told The Irish Times back in 1996. "How can this be? There was a time in our history when we seemed to have been asleep; we lost Beckett to France, Joyce to Zurich, and the St Patrick's Day parade to New York. It is time to take some of these back."

In fact, we never "lost" the St Patrick's Day parade to New York. Unlike Joyce and Beckett, it wasn't born here. There have been parades in Boston and New York since the 18th century, organised first by Protestant Irish emigrants but then taken over and greatly expanded by the huge waves of Catholic migrants who arrived from the 1840s onward. By contrast, in the early years of independence, the Irish state saw no need for a parade, restricting itself to a celebratory Mass and a march past by the Army. After the second World War, the day was reserved for an industrial pageant "showcasing Irish industry and agriculture".

That pageant was replaced in the 1970s by a Dublin Tourism parade, which saw as its major goal the boosting of revenue by attracting Irish-Americans and others back "home" so that they could step out on the streets of Dublin.

But in 1996 Colgan was ably articulating a rising sense of confidence and optimism in Ireland, along with a growing level of dissatisfaction with the drab array of dingy floats (most of them, it seemed, advertising security companies) which made their way very, very slowly through the capital's streets, accompanied by a few half-frozen American teen marching bands. St Patrick's Day in Dublin always seemed to be cold, it always seemed to be raining, and everything was tatty and mediocre. In fact, in its own cringeworthy, self-flagellating way, the St Patrick's Day parade of the 1980s was a perfect distillation of what it meant to be Irish at that time - so much so, that these days you'll even hear people waxing nostalgic about it.

UNDER COLGAN, THE whole thing was taken by the scruff of the neck and given a much-needed shaking. St Patrick's Day became St Patrick's Festival. There were fireworks. There was street theatre. The festival benefited from the talents of Páraic Breathnach and Macnas, who for several years had been drawing on the European tradition of street events to develop exciting and colourful pageants on the streets of Galway.

This, it was claimed, was the new Ireland: post-conflict, newly prosperous, multi-cultural. There was much loose talk about how we were a naturally Mediterranean people, how our innate affinity for carnival was being reawakened. And there was an implicit (or, in Breathnach's case, explicit) rejection of the Christian underpinning of the day in favour of a bright new post-Catholic dawn (where that left Patrick himself was anyone's guess).

How well has all this succeeded? Colgan and most of the original team have long moved on, but this week's St Patrick's Festival, which runs until Sunday, makes great claims. The website announces that: "The principle [ sic] aim of St Patrick's Festival, since its inauguration, is to develop a major annual international festival around the national holiday over which the 'owners' of the festival, the Irish people, would stand proud." But the events planned for the next five days hardly constitute a "major international festival".

Since the festival receives substantial support from Fáilte Ireland and other state bodies, as well as Dublin City Council and a raft of corporate sponsors, it would be easy to lay the blame at their door for this unconvincing simulation of jollity and excellence. Certainly, the stale odour of state and corporate mediocrity hangs over this week's programme. Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill at Vicar Street on Thursday. A line-up of familiar Irish comedians at the same venue on Saturday. An exhibition of Irish crafts at Farmleigh House. A version of James Stephens's The Crock of Gold at the Olympia. A chance to board the Jeanie Johnston. An exhibition of donkey photographs at George's Quay. It seems reasonable to ask how many of these events might have taken place anyway without the support of the festival. Taken as a whole, they constitute a pretty uninspired and uninspiring programme. Perhaps it's no accident that the theme of this year's parade is "Wishful Thinking".

A festival symposium taking place today may touch on some of the causes of the malaise, but don't count on it. Titled Whose Space Is It Anyway?, it aims to address "the thorny, very relevant issue of public space in a post-Tiger Ireland". The agenda, and the participants, suggests that it will cleave pretty closely to the prevailing bien-pensant orthodoxy which informs such debates, and which provides the intellectual underpinning, such as it is, for the entire festival.

That orthodoxy runs as follows: Ireland is currently being gobbled up by rampant private development; public space is being replaced by privately owned leisure space and shopping malls. It is, therefore, essential that we resist this "exurbanisation" of Irish life by creating new, publicly owned spaces for play and celebration within our cities.

The validity of this argument has been widely accepted by local authorities and state agencies, and its impact on the fabric of our towns and cities has been largely positive. But there have also been some spectacular misfires and there still seems to be a national unease around the issue of creating new civic spaces.

It's no accident that architects and urban activists have been central to the remaking of St Patrick's Day in Dublin. The whole point of parades and street festivals is that they're an urban phenomenon, celebrating city life. That's why the best St Patrick's Day parade has always been in Manhattan. In Ireland, since the foundation of the state, the urban experience was ignored in favour of a national narrative which privileged the rural and pastoral, a narrative promulgated by a political and intellectual caste which mostly lived in Dublin. This had catastrophic effects on the fabric of the city in the 1960s and 1970s, with unsympathetic development and barbaric road-widening.

BUT, IN THE late 1980s, a new generation of architects was beginning to agitate for a different approach to living in the city, and saw St Patrick's Day as a possible key. The first sustained critique of the old-style parade came in 1992 from the UCD Architectural Graduates' Association, who described it as "a collection of separate elements strung together along the streets . . . sadly lacking in entertainment value, in imagination and in design", and suggested that it should be reimagined as "two hours of living art".

At that time, work was in progress on the city's first major cultural/commercial regeneration project - Temple Bar - which was to set a pattern followed elsewhere. Tax breaks would fuel landmark urban regeneration projects alongside major architectural statements. Culture and commerce would work hand in hand to reshape the city in the mould of European counterparts such as Barcelona.

A decade later, it hasn't quite worked out that way. Temple Bar is a curate's egg of the good, the bad and the mediocre. Other, more grandiose spaces, such as Smithfield and George's Quay, have failed to connect with the public. But vast amounts of money have been made along the way. And the orthodoxy remains in place, although, like all such theories, it has become smug and self-satisfied.

Meanwhile, we are left with this odd, not very impressive festival, severed from its religious past, yet located due to a quirk of ecclesiastical history at a time of the year when only the foolhardy venture out without their winter woollies.

Composed of a ragbag of disparate events, most of which would probably have happened anyway, it conveys little or no sense of a strong, coherent vision of what is being celebrated, or why.

The dirty little secret of St Patrick's Day lies in what happens when the 24-hour news channels so beloved of Fáilte Ireland end their satellite links to O'Connell Street, and the suburban families go home for their dinners. From mid-afternoon onward, March 17th is the most depressing and dangerous day of the year in Dublin, with rampant drunkenness and violence. Unwary tourists out on the streets will soon become aware that they're not in Barcelona.

In retrospect, the old parades, from the 1940s to the 1990s, unwittingly offered an insight into the true nature of the society from which they sprang. It's easy to laugh at their naivety and shoddiness now, but the current festival may be fulfilling the same function. In common with many of the other key signifiers of Ireland in 2006, it is strangely opaque and meaningless.

Like the Spire on O'Connell Street, it successfully resists interpretation. It's just there, and we are invited to agree that it's just great, isn't it? Well actually no, it's not.