Chou En Lai, the late Chinese foreign minister, when asked once for his thoughts on the lasting impact of the French Revolution, memorably declared that it was "too early to say". Likewise, it is probably premature to judge the success or otherwise of Temple Bar, but with Laura Magahy, managing director of Temple Bar Properties, leaving at the end of this month, a tentative verdict seems timely.
So what is it really like, this much-hyped "cultural quarter" in the heart of Dublin? A few statistics paint the picture. Within a 24-acre enclave of relatively narrow and poorly re-cobbled streets, there are now at least 44 restaurants, 28 licensed premises, 15 nightclubs, 12 hotels or hostels, 12 cultural centres, 1,200 employees, 1,500 residents and - staggeringly - 100,000 visitors every 24 hours, on average.
Pedestrian numbers have quadrupled since 1992. On balmy summer weekends, the area is so thronged that it can be difficult to navigate your way through, particularly in the evening. It becomes what architect Sean O Laoire calls a vast urban drawing-room, filled with late-night liggers, nightclub goers, strollers, revellers, buskers, beggars and tourists out for a night on the town. Temple Bar is so intense that it's just too much for some. "What about all the noise?" they ask. Ordinary street noise is tolerable enough, at least off the main drag. What annoys residents most are amplified music thumping out from licensed premises and the groaning hydraulics of the garbage truck that trundles around at 5 a.m. collecting nine tonnes of waste a day from 92 "Eurobins" scattered about the place.
Ten years ago, Temple Bar was a bohemian quarter with very little in the way of streetlife. Now, it is a bourgeois quarter with buckets of streetlife, some of it quite unsavoury. "I'm sick to death of all the vomit and the urine," one local resident moans. According to her: "You see the real Temple Bar at 2 a.m." when those who have imbibed too much stagger out of a pub or nightclub with their bladders full. What planning consultant Fergal MacCabe finds wryly fascinating is that it was never meant to be like that. "They started out with lovely images of people sitting out under Cinzano umbrellas, like the Left Bank or the Marais in Paris. But it turned out to be completely different. With cheap airfares and the peace dividend, we ended up with that great electrical malfunction - the bad element - coming in."
Stag-party tourism reached its peak two years ago and is no longer entertained there - at least not officially. Temple Bar Properties (TBP), the State agency which has overseen the area's development since 1991, not only produced a report showing that it was putting off more discerning visitors, but also managed to persuade the publicans that catering for rowdy "stags" was not in their long-term interest. An extra acre of drinking space had been shovelled into the area with, in some cases, TBP's involvement, as An Taisce pointed out. But the brakes were finally applied in 1997 after it became clear Temple Bar was being overwhelmed by the licensed trade; it was turning into Dublin's version of Sachsenhausen, the night-town zone of Frankfurt, and had long since displaced the basement "dives" in Leeson Street.
The publicans, who have raked in huge benefits from tax incentives, now contribute towards the cost of street cleaning and other initiatives. Every morning, the Curved Street's limestone paving - pitted from the rolling of beer kegs into and out of the Music Centre - is hosed down before chattering schoolkids, walking two-by-two, make their way to the Ark, one of the real wonders of Temple Bar.
Architecturally, the project is a huge success. The walls of TBP's offices are plastered with awards, there is a whole archive of press cuttings from newspapers and magazines all over the world and the company still receives at least five calls or visits per week from foreign study groups, usually urban renewal outfits or consultants "trying to pick our brains", as Magahy says, to find out how it was done.
Though crudely gated at night for security reasons, Meeting House Square - the area's architectural set-piece - provides the venue for a successful food market on Saturdays, children's activities on Sundays and open-air movies on a new box-shutter screen mounted on the previously pristine facade of architects O'Donnell and Tuomey's Gallery of Photography (the old roll-down inset screen gave up).
Ten years ago, Parliament Street and Dame Street were as dead as doornails - little more than transit routes on the way out of town. One of the very welcome spinoffs of the development of Temple Bar is that now they're hopping at almost every hour of the day or night.
The "West End", as it used to be called, is the latest lure. Now renamed "Old City", this is TBP's largest-ever development - a dense urban quarter of European quality, with 190 apartments, 22 retail units and the area's first creche, which must be for kids from outside Temple Bar as there are so few living in the area. It is bisected by a new street, Cow's Lane, linking Lord Edward Street with Essex Street West.
The creation of a new street in the city is such a rare event that it deserves to be celebrated. In this case, however, the achievement is tarnished by an unforgivable failure to align it on the axis of SS Michael and John's Church (former). The fact that Dublin Corporation insisted that it had to be widened from six to nine metres is no excuse; the extra width could have been apportioned equally on both sides.
A lot of things might have been done differently. Over £5 million was sunk into gutting SS Michael and John, the city's oldest Catholic church, to turn it into Dublin Tourism's Viking Adventure. Though it would have admirably suited the Music Centre, its fate was dictated by the need to boost visitor numbers in the area, as TBP's £40 million for cultural projects came via the EU-funded tourism programme.
But Derek Tynan, an award-winning architect who was involved in Group 91, authors of the Temple Bar Framework Plan, believes that, whatever its faults, the project redefined Dublin and raised the game for apartment design and the treatment of public space in the city. "By celebrating youth culture, it presented a different vision of Ireland, prefiguring everything that's happened over the past 10 years," he says.
TBP not only had the vision but, most importantly, ownership of the land on which it was to be realised, through the acquisition of CIE's and Dublin Corporation's holdings in the area - a clear lesson for Spencer Dock. What's more, during its crucial early phase, the project had the Taoiseach's Department as its patron. And nobody in the corporation would have risked defying the wishes of CJH, for it was he. Whatever about the subsequent turf wars between the corporation and TBP, particularly over the ill-fated Wibbly Wobbly bridge, "the fantastic thing about Temple Bar is that it re-made the map and did more than anything else to stitch the northside and the southside together," as Tynan says. Its area-based approach is now being replicated elsewhere in the city, producing such dramatic initiatives as Smithfield.