Back Home: Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, remembers growing up on Blackhorse Avenue when it was thronged with children, cattle, and sheep, with hardly a car in sight.

My mother has often told an amusing little story about a faux pas I made when I was four. I was sent into Lynch's corner shop on Blackhorse Avenue, and Mrs Lynch asked me my name, address and how long I'd lived there.

"Since before my mammy and daddy were married," I replied, in all innocence.

It was such an unintentionally risqué thing for a child to say then that the old woman just laughed and laughed, and probably retold it to all her regular customers. But that was in the 1950s, when Dublin - like the rest of Ireland - was suffocated by the authentic oppression of the Catholic Church.

Hellfire-and-brimstone Redemptorist retreats packed the Holy Family Church on Aughrim Street, generating long queues for the Confession boxes. And on the feast of Corpus Christi, papal flags flew from hundreds of houses as the parish priest carried a monstrance in solemn procession through the streets.

We lived off Glenbeigh Road in a house our parents bought when they were married in 1948; they still live there today. My mother had a Singer sewing machine and used it to make pants for myself and my brother, Liam, and skirts for my sister, Edel. She also expertly knitted cardigans and pullovers for us.

This was in the era of thrift, of make-do and mend, when nobody had any money. Apart from my father, who was in the motor trade, and maybe one or two others, nobody on our cul-de-sac had a car. Cars were generally garaged, so there was plenty of room for lads to play football whenever they wanted.

At the railway bridge on Blackhorse Avenue, traffic was so light that when a steam train passed beneath it we used to run across the road without feat of being run over to get a second blast of the engine's belching smoke. The flat tops of the railway banks were allotments then, with beds of cabbages and potatoes.

The Phoenix Park was like a big back garden for us all. We loved playing in the People's Gardens or on the Polo Grounds, getting ice creams in the kiosk and visiting the zoo. At night, you could hear the lions roaring and the IRA bomb that finally destroyed the great equestrian statue of Field Marshal Gough.

In the breakfastroom every morning, we would see the Tricolour being raised over the parade ground of McKee Barracks - a small flag when it was windy, and a really big one for hazy summer days. And, of course, we believed the canard that plans for the barracks had been mixed up with the Punjab.

Old Mr Murphy was the first on our road to have a television set, and my brother and myself used to go over to watch the Betram Mills circus on the snowy small screen. His son, Terry, became director of the zoo; we always envied him the lovely, Virginia creeper-clad house that went with that job.

The cattle market was an overwhelming presence in the area, with pens spread out on a vast site along the North Circular Road between Aughrim Street and Prussia Street. We often had to cycle through herds of cattle or sheep on our way to school in St Vincent's CBS, just opposite Glasnevin Cemetery. The City Arms Hotel on Prussia Street did a roaring trade serving up corned beef and cabbage to the cattle dealers. And on the corner of Blackhorse Avenue was the City Abattoir, where most of the animals sold on a fair day ended up. I remember ticking off one cruel drover for beating his bullocks.

There was a dairy in Prussia Street where we were sent to get buttermilk for my mother to make brown bread, which she baked every day. Because it was ladled out of the churn, you had to bring your own container. Some people even kept pigs in the backyards off Stoneybatter; you could hear them squealing.

Stoneybatter was, and still is, like the main street of a country town, except most of the accents were pure Dublin. There was a fish shop called Connolly's on one side, where we went every Friday, and Kane's fruit and vegetable shop on the other, and Pender's clothes shop right beside Stanhope Street convent. Our favourite shop as kids was Turner's, which stocked all the comics and magazines we wanted. Built out of a single storey from a house on Manor Street, its pink-and-white front, the colours of candy, was like a beacon for us at the weekend in the years before our parents succumbed and we finally got a television.

A few doors away there was a general store - Murray's - with big oak counters and sacks of flour and wheatenmeal. The first "self-service" shop opened just opposite, and I still remember the novelty of picking up a basket and filling it from the open shelves. Little did we know! The Cattle Market closed down in the early 1970s and, with it, went the abattoir. Their sites remained derelict for some time until they were eventually replaced by two Dublin Corporation housing estates. Drumalee, built on the site of the market, is a slap in the face for the grand Victorian terrace that overlooks it.

The final stretch of the North Circular Road, lined by mature London plane trees, always had a certain grandeur, with the Wellington monument in the park perfectly aligned on its axis. Although the houses are as good as anything on the southside's Palmerston Road, there is a palpable air of neglect, even of degradation.

Most of the houses are now in flats, a disproportionately-large number occupied by welfare tenants. Ornate cast-iron railings have been removed to provide casual off-street parking and grey rubbish bins are the principal features of untended gardens. Neither the landlords not the tenants seem to care.

Two years ago, concerned local residents marched from Phibsboro Church to the Phoenix Park calling for action to be taken against overcrowding, burglaries and muggings. They wanted a halt to "the destruction of North Circular Road" with an area plan "to make us proud to live here" as northsiders.

Off Glenbeigh Road, the previously open back lanes are now closed off by high gates in the interest of security. There had been too much trouble, too much anti-social behaviour in the area to put up with it any longer. Even my parents' glasshouse became a target for stone-throwing kids from McKee Park. The complexion of the area has changed. There's been an influx of young professionals into the artisan houses of Oxmantown, all now "desirable bijou residences" close to the city centre, and an influx of immigrants, too.

Cycling down Manor Street, the most visible sight is a small forest of tower cranes rising from the west side of Smithfield, where we once walked the Checkpoint Charlie set for that Richard Burton spy movie, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Smithfield was as bleak then as parts of east Berlin.

Development has even arrived in Stoneybatter - a block of apartments over shop units at street level, on a site which had been derelict for decades.

Although the massing is broken down to mimic individual buildings and there's also a corner turret over the new Londis shop, it's all a bit crude and ungainly.

Nobody seems to know what's going to happen to the largest tract of undeveloped land in the area - Grangegorman.

Once a mental asylum with walls like a fortress, or so it seemed to us as kids, it has been earmarked as a future campus for the Dublin Institute of Technology. But when will that materialise? J.J. Hanlon's pub still survives at Hanlon's Corner, though the junction itself was widened considerably to cater for all the traffic generated by the development of Blanchardstown. Cars are everywhere, whether moving or static; on our road, they're half-parked on the footpaths, leaving only a channel in the middle.

The 37 bus that once terminated at Skreen Road now goes all the way out to Carpenterstown, beyond Clonsilla, where there's an ocean of new housing estates. It can no longer negotiate Aughrim Street because of all the parked cars. Neither could a Corpus Christi procession, even if there was one.