JUST five years ago it all seemed possible. Temple Bar was to be a model for inner city regeneration with "an artist in every attic", bankrolled by a restaurant or trendy shop in the basement. Virtual old folk and children peopled the architects' drawings.

Temple Bar would be an urban village with artists, students, single working folk and families calling it "home". The 1980s diversity that had mushroomed under CIE's plan to turn the area into a monster bus station would be polished up with a little 1990s imagination. All that was needed was a bit of planning, a load of cash, et voila, Dublin's Left Bank is born.

Only last week, the latest batch of apartments with Dublin's trendiest address was snapped up at prices from £77,000 to £185,000. To avoid the unseemly queuing that accompanied previous apartment sales, the 150 buyers, desperate to part with their cash for one of the 36 apartments, were given a priority viewing. Your £77,000 got you a floor area of between 430 and 505 square feet. Add another £12,000 if you were lucky enough to be able to buy one of the car parking spaces.

Low cost housing this ain't. Yet in 1992 Temple Bar Properties stated that up to one third of its housing would be for low income occupiers.

Two years ago I spoke to one of the few people living in the area who had grown up there. At the time she was more surprised than anybody to find her ramshackle neighbourhood getting a makeover. As her brothers and sisters moved out to suburban semis she stayed and watched the artists and students moving into the dank rooms in the dilapidated buildings around her.

Then the building and demolition started and she put up with all the noise and disruption, as she was looking forward to having all this new life on her doorstep. But it's not her doorstep anymore. The building, where her parents lived for more than 50 years, houses a restaurant and private apartment development.

Okay, so maybe the whole utopian idea of social housing, low rent decent studio space and thriving alternative shops and eateries was just a woolly jumpered dream. Temple Bar is not the first arty quarter to be tarted up into a tourist attraction. London's Covent Garden and Les Halles in Paris saw casual bohemia turned into a sterile replica of itself.

One of the developers of Covent Garden commented more than a decade ago that an area could be "destroyed by other things than a bulldozer. The local baker's becomes a professional studio, the cheap cafe: a chic restaurant, the dartboard is removed from the pub and gradually many more gin and tonics are sold."

Temple Bar has become the brashest example of the cash that is sloshing around Dublin in these boom days. If your needs in life include designer spectacles, sun dried tomatoes and a pub every five yards, it is heaven.

The experiment in hothousing an area for development has been an example of pragmatism over idealism. One example is the multi storey car park on Fleet Street. The old red brick building on that site had been earmarked for a student house or an indoor market.

This plan became unrealistic when Temple Bar Properties paid £2 million for the three quarter acre site in 1993. The building was bulldozed and the car park built. Cars provided more revenue per hour than student tenants or market stalls to give the required return on investment.

Supporters of the new Temple Bar have an irrefutable argument to support the project: "It's better than a bus station". And it is. TBP's Laura Magahy once remarked that Temple Bar was "everyone's secret and we want to keep it that way."

Along with the Docklands Development Authority, the TBP approach to development was the first of its kind in Ireland. In Britain it all happened 10 years earlier. In the 1980s a Thatcher government set up Urban Development Councils to buy up large tracts of land and work with the private sector to reverse inner city decay.

By 1991 the UDCs were being replaced with a system of three way partnership between local councils and public and private investors. The reason they were scrapped, critics said, was because of a failure to provide benefits to local communities, in terms of employment and affordable housing. The UDCs had put just four per cent of their budgets into social housing and community groups.

Their brave new developments became self contained pockets of affluence squeezing out all but those with the money to buy into the dream.