EVERY Tuesday morning, at the height of a karaoke singing craze, residents of the Ballymun tower blocks could be seen queuing in all weathers outside a nearby public house.
The men and women gathered at the door of the appropriately named Towers pub had just paid their weekly visit to the dole office and, cash in hand, were all set to blast away the Ballymun blues with soulful renditions of O Sole Mio and Suspicious Minds.
This image reveals more about the people who grew up and still live in the flats than any of the predictably downbeat obituaries which have followed the announcement that Dublin Corporation is moving the bulldozers into Ballymun. While looking forward to rejoining the land of horizontal living, older residents will look back almost wistfully at friendships forged and obstacles overcome in homes that seemed to touch the clouds.
Local youngsters spent a lot of time wishing they lived there rather than in the neat (but infinitely more mundane, it must have seemed) two storey houses down the road. And, all over the world, cinemagoers were fed a romantic view of Dublin's sky rises. When viewed on celluloid, Ballymun became a land of roaming horses where anything could happen. Unfortunately, it invariably did.
"To be honest, most of us are glad to see them torn down," says Mark Kennedy, who is in his late 50s and has lived in Ballymun since 1968. "But you can't help thinking that if all the problems hadn't happened, we would still be enjoying it here."
As it is, Mr Kennedy doesn't leave his home at night for fear, he says, of being attacked. The Government's £5,000 surrender grant scheme offered in the early 1980s saw a lot of the more financially stable families leave the area. The flats became populated by single mothers and the unemployed, says Brendan Kenny, a corporation official working in the area. The once hoped for balanced social mix proved an elusive goal.
But there was always hope. Ballymun has more community and welfare groups than perhaps any area in the city. People like the late author and community activist Pat Tierney lived there with the knowledge that, because unusually strong links had been built up between residents in Ballymun, the problems that plagued them had some chance of being resolved.
One of the most unforgettable scenes in the film Into The West featured a horse, a small boy and, an erratic lift servicing one of the Ballymun Towers. "You're not bringing that horse in here," complains one of the film's main characters to a small boy standing beside a horse. "The stairs would kill him," is his indignant reply.
One Dublin woman remembers taking a lengthy detour past the Ballymun Towers in a taxi when she brought her English fiance home for a first meeting with her parents. The man, having marvelled at the cinematic version, was suitably impressed with the reallife towers and had something to talk about with his potential in laws over afternoon tea. Some have suggested that with a little clever marketing the towers could have become a sort of quirky tourist attraction along the lines of the U2 Wall.
THE demolition of the Ballymun tower blocks will have a profound effect not just on residents but on people from the surrounding areas - Santry, Coolock Glasnevin, Finglas and Beaumont. For years the soaring towers dominated the skyline. There was pride - "We had something that nobody else in the country had," says one fan of the flats. "There was something so modern about it. Sophisticated, almost. This was as far removed from the thatched cottage image of Ireland as you could possibly get.
As drugs spread through the complex, in line with an increase in violent crime across the city, outsiders became the only ones to garner any pleasure from Ballymun. By 1980, house prices in the area had plummeted. Ballymun had become the antithesis of Dublin 4 - an intensely undesirable address.
Almost inevitably Ballymun Avenue became Glasnevin Avenue and a pub, Ballymun House, was transformed into The Willows. As it turned out, this transformation was a somewhat superficial one. The pub is still listed in the phone book as Ballymun House and many "Glasnevin" residents refer to the local watering hole by its original name.
What is obvious to everyone is that the Ballymun flats complex is riddled with too many problems for its continued existence to be justified by a few big screen epics and childhood nostalgia. "Most of the tenants I have spoken to can't, wait for them to go," Brendan" Kenny points out. "It was viewed as a quick fix for housing at the time and this has been borne out."
Tuesday mornings at the towers will never be the same.