I was writing yesterday about the colossal and irrevocable changes in Ireland today. Many of these are attitudinal - and few things seem as comical as yesterday's passionately held but now abandoned opinions.
Yet the most obvious and measurable changes are in the fabric of Irish life; in the motorways which cross our countryside, in the bungalows which by Martin Cullen's diseased imprimatur are spreading across the countryside like a plague of fungal concrete, and most of all, in the transformation of Dublin.
The capital that many of us knew in our youth is dead. That was a Dublin of a handful of restaurants, of little and limited nightlife, of a streetscape which was laid down in the 18th century, added to by the Victorians, celebrated by Joyce, and then, after a lunatic period of destruction between 1916 and 1922, almost untouched by independent Ireland. The city was largely left to the falling rain, the soot and the rising damp, and for most of the 20th century, virtually nothing new was built - and that which was usually was horrifying.
All changed. A parallel city, entirely new in vision and in dynamism, a mini-Singapore, is now seeping out of the edges of old Dublin. Docklands double in size and prosperity every year. Huge quayside apartment blocks have made the Liffey waterfront, unfashionable for two centuries, now profoundly chic indeed. Industrial suburbs have sprouted where a decade ago cows patiently awaited CAP payments.
A Castleknock Rip van Winkle who went to sleep in 1906 would think today that he had awoken in Johannesburg. We are still mid-flux; and possibly we shall always be. Maybe the convention that Dublin regularly enters a condition of stasis is now gone forever: Dublin henceforth will know no stability, only change - which makes the arrival of Christine Casey's The Buildings of Dublin (Yale) all the more timely.
The book is slightly misnamed - for though it is a celebration of the many fine buildings of the capital, it is also a rich smorgasbord of urban culture and history. Thus we learn that the old toll-booths on the North Circular Road from the Phoenix Park (at Aughrim Street, Phibsborough, and Dorset Street) were calculated by horsepower: a penny ha'penny for one horse, a shilling for six (some equipage, that), with tolls being doubled on Sundays - which was no doubt the real reason for the Phoenix Park murders.
The Dublin that was created in the hundred years after the 18th-century Wide Streets Commission was built by an ethos which has since vanished. Twentieth-century Catholic nationalist Ireland simply washed over the Protestant community which had largely (but not exclusively) been the author of the city. Consider Merrion Hall, raised in the 1860s to house 2,000 Plymouth Brethren. The largest place of worship in Dublin, now it is the Davenport Hotel.
It is not alone. Christine names so many Protestant churches, with the melancholy (former) providing a parenthetic gravestone to a now extinct urban culture. What has become of the (former) Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Langrishe Place, off the North Circular Road? The (former) Wesleyan Methodist Chapel of Great Charles Street is now the home of Pavee Point. The (former) Presbyterian Church on Sean McDermot Street is now a grain store.
The (former) Welsh Orthodox Church in Talbot Street is now an amusement arcade, thus home to the abominable vice of gambling - the equivalent to the Catholic mind of the (former) Loreto on the Green becoming a pole-dancing club, or the (former) Pro-Cathedral being turned into a school for suicide bombers.
Over the past decade, Dublin has embarked upon the greatest and most challenging period of development in its history. Hedged in by hills and sea, dramatic vertical growth is now unavoidable - and alas, not always fair, for soon towers will cast long shadows over streets which for two centuries have enjoyed day-long sunlight. But the only way of not having vertical growth is by allowing endless sprawl on the southern, northern and north-western axes, covering several counties, leading to unmanageable traffic congestion, unsupportably high land prices, and insufferable social alienation in a ring of festering, vicious conurbations reaching into the midlands.
So the city's traditional skyline is changing for ever, just as the culture of Catholic Dublin is now vanishing as totally as that of Protestant Dublin before it. Tall towers will overlook seashores and empty, priestless Catholic churches will find new purposes, as a newly godless people learn to live without religion, and in stacks, as their fellows do in all capitals. These very transformations oblige us to preserve as much as we can of the founding Protestant civilisation and its Catholic successor, just as Rome preserves its (admittedly) slightly more majestic pagan and renaissance legacies.
Books about Dublin were once ten-a-penny, and full of tired old clichés about a rare ould times city which never existed. The truth is that the poverty that characterised old Dublin in both Protestant and Catholic epochs generated more vice than virtue: it caused emigration, crime, prostitution, disease and premature death, and the legendary goodness found among those who lived in tenements was largely strategic; whomever we help today will be obliged to return the favour tomorrow. And really, that's all there is to it.
However, and happily, Christine does not peddle any of the dreary sentimentality about Dublin as it once was. Instead, in a seriously good book, she has lovingly painted a quite wonderful architectural and historical portrait of our capital, at the very moment that it embarks upon the greatest adventure in its history. All those unspent Christmas book-tokens now have a home.