City changes applauded by journalist

The State has a lot to congratulate itself about when it considers Dublin which has now become a self-assured, cosmopolitan capital city, the National College of Ireland heard last night.

Delivering the college's inaugural "Dublin Lecture" series in the Civic Offices, Dublin, Mr Frank McDonald, Environment Editor of The Irish Times, said many everyday scenes in the city which are now taken for granted would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

He instanced a recent lunch in Temple Bar; the woman who showed him to a table was English, the waiter was Scandinavian, the pizza chef American and the kitchen porter from somewhere in Asia.

It was, he said, evidence of the changed nature of the city that it attracted such international interest.

Some wonderful things had happened in the city's development, Mr McDonald said. Temple Bar, "for all its faults" was credited, alongside the restoration of the City Hall and St Catherine's Church in Thomas Street.

He also mentioned the Millennium Bridge, the huge programme of upgrading public housing and Smithfield, although, he acknowledged, Smithfield was still in the making.

The best change had been the repopulation of the inner city with its bars, bakeries, restaurants and shops.

However, there was a downside. The worst of our racism had surfaced, while homeless people remained on the streets, wrapped in blankets beside cash machines.

`We are," he said, "in grave danger of losing everything that made us attractive, even charming, in our rush to accumulate money."

On the proposed sports campus at Abbotstown, "with the 80,000-seater Bertie Bowl as its grandiose centrepiece" and the proposal to move the Abbey Theatre from its historic site to a South Bank-style complex in the Docklands area, he said we are "losing the run of ourselves".