1980s REVISITED: ARCHITECTURE: In the 1980s, Dublin was an ugly, decaying and derelict place. But after years of neglect by those in power, a new vision of the city finally emerged that was to kick-start its transformation
BOY OH BOY, it was bleak. Dublin in the early to mid-1980s was an ugly, unloved place, its urban core left scarred by such widespread dereliction, decay and social deprivation that one former lord mayor (the late Jim Mitchell) admitted that it had "about as much character as a knackers' yard".
This line was quoted in The Destruction of Dublin (1985), which I have to confess I wrote in a rage. I simply couldn't understand why the city wasn't valued and, worse still, that it was being treated by property developers as little more than a quarry and by road engineers as a huge inconvenience to the movement of traffic.
Hard as it may be to believe nowadays, there were 60 hectares (150 acres) of derelict land in the inner city - about six times the area of St Stephen's Green - and I set about documenting why it was there, and who owned it, in a lengthy series of articles in The Irish Times under the running title Derelict Dublin. It made grim reading in 1982.
After all, the city had a fine urban design tradition dating back to the Duke of Ormonde and the Wide Streets Commissioners, not forgetting the great work done during the first decade of independence - the rebuilding of O'Connell Street, the GPO, Custom House and Four Courts and the development of Marino housing estate.
Somewhere along the way, we lost that civic-minded spirit - probably not long after Fianna Fáil first came to power in 1932. Éamon de Valera, although he spent most of his life in Dublin, had no interest in the city or its heritage, while the party he led was dominated by rural deputies who seemed to regard it as a "foreign" place.
Growing up in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s, my memories of the city are in black and white or shades of grey. There were slums at the heart of it, particularly in and around Gardiner Street, and those who had money were discreet about their good fortune. Cinemas on O'Connell Street provided what limited entertainment there was.
We marvelled at Liberty Hall, though at least some of us were repelled by the assault on Georgian Dublin that got under way in earnest when the ESB demolished a terrace of late 18th-century houses on Fitzwilliam Street. And all through that time, the inner city was being evacuated or left as the preserve of those too poor to move to the suburbs.
The road engineers had drawn up their plans to turn historic streets into dual carriageways, to cater for all the cars coming in from increasingly far-flung suburbs on the periphery of the city. Even in the 1980s, we thought Lucan and Leixlip were far out; we never imagined that Dublin would develop a commuter belt extending out to 100km.
Although the engineers got away with demolishing much of Parnell Street, Clanbrassil Street and New Street - all of which fell in the late 1980s - we managed to put an end to their plans to level nearly every building on both sides of the Liffey Quays, to create standard roads 18m (60ft) wide; fortunately, there wasn't enough money to do it.
Students Against the Destruction of Dublin - many of them among today's younger architects and one in Leinster House (Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe) - provided the shock troops for a campaign to get the authorities to start treating Dublin as a European capital city, rather than some "rare ould times" relic that could be bashed about.
One-time heresies are now mainstream. It is extraordinary that much of the agenda set by the Dublin Crisis Conference at the Synod Hall in Christchurch Place in February 1986 has since become public policy - re-populating the inner city, recasting the destructive road plans and making more space available for buses, cyclists and pedestrians.
But there was no way of stopping the civic offices at Wood Quay. After the two "bunkers" were first occupied by city officials in 1985, I asked a taxi driver what he thought of them as we passed down Winetavern Street. "It's a real Guns of Navarone job," he said, unprompted. It was the best one-line architectural critique I've heard.
What a difference two decades make. The landscape of Irish architecture in the mid-1980s is almost unrecognisable, looking back at it now. In those bleak years, most recently qualified architects had to join the annual exodus of 40,000 people looking for work and inspiration elsewhere as Ireland became an economic basket case.
Those who remained mostly did modest work - garden rooms, office lobby refurbishments, restrained houses in the countryside, inventive mews schemes, designer kitchens and fantastical unbuilt projects. Architects had more time to think and to engage in polemics, pamphleteering and self-promotion, which they did with gusto.
There was the Blue Studio on Dawson Street, the Quays Project and an exhibition at the Municipal Gallery called Figurative Architecture, which was staged by several of those who would go on to form Group 91, authors of the influential but unbuilt Making a Modern Street and the Temple Bar Framework Plan, which was realised to a large extent.
It's a measure of how times have changed that Paul Keogh, whose Aldo Rossi-inspired milking parlour for Jersey cows at Dublin Zoo won some notice in 1988, headed the team that designed an elegant 32-storey tower for a state-owned site near Heuston Station less than 15 years later. (It has since been pigeonholed due to the recession).
The most notorious developer of the era was the late Patrick Gallagher, a man with the Midas touch - at least until his property empire collapsed like a house of cards in April 1982. Just before that, he had bought a huge site on the west side of St Stephen's Green and demolished everything on it, including the legendary Dandelion Market.
What rose up in its place was the St Stephen's Green shopping centre, a crude pastiche of both the Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens and the Gaiety Theatre. As I wrote, when it opened in 1988, its fussy façade resembled a Mississippi riverboat that had been stranded on the edge of the Green, minus a paddlewheel.
That was the year of the Dublin Millennium - or "aluminium", as some Dubs called it - a trumped-up excuse to celebrate the city, even though there wasn't much to celebrate. But the idea, dreamt up by then city manager Frank Feely (who could even sing Dublin in the Rare Old Times), did focus public attention on the inner city and its potential.
The Urban Renewal Act of 1986, offering juicy tax incentives, rates remission and other allowances, was slowly making an impact in designated areas, such as the Liffey Quays. An early scheme to qualify, ironically, was the petrol station on Usher's Quay; it even featured on the cover of Dublin Corporation's first urban-renewal brochure.
Things were moving in the Custom House Docks, where a separate authority had been set up to produce a master plan for the area's redevelopment. That was before Dermot Desmond had his brainwave about locating the International Financial Services Centre there, convincing Charles J Haughey in 1987 that it was a real runner.
It went on to become the biggest money-spinner Ireland has ever seen, netting the exchequer massive amounts of revenue (even at low corporation tax rates), populating glass blocks with "men in suits" dealing in derivatives and setting the scene for the development of the docklands during the boom times that followed.
Long before the IFSC started to materialise in 1990, the minister for the environment at the time, Pádraig Flynn, was able to say of Dublin that "the town is hopping" with development activity, or at least with developers such as Tom Gilmartin, who was planning to build not one but two major shopping centres - on Bachelors Walk and way out at Quarryvale.
The latter, as we now know, turned into a squalid saga of bribery and corruption, with Flynn himself as one of the beneficiaries; he lodged the £50,000 given to him by Gilmartin as a donation to Fianna Fáil in a bogus non-resident account he and his wife, Dorothy, had at the AIB branch in Castlebar, Co Mayo. That was par for the course then.
Thoughout the 1980s, there wasn't a single apartment available for purchase in the inner city apart from the flats that had to be provided as the "residential content" of much larger office schemes.
It wasn't until 1991 that the first free-standing, purpose-built apartment block (by BKD) was developed at Wolfe Tone Quay, near Collins Barracks.
Since then, some 20,000 have been built, and the area between the two canals has seen its population increase from 75,000 in 1991 to 115,000 in 2006, reversing decades of decline. Even though much of what was built in the first rush of development was rubbish, this influx of new residents has fundamentally changed the city's character.
Dublin is a more European city now - except for the terrible traffic and the North American-style sprawl that generates it. With the onset of another recession, perhaps we will have time to reflect on where we've come from, what we've done and what we could do to make it a more environmentally sustainable city for the 21st century.
Time to think, like we did in the 1980s.