"I see seven towers, I only see one way out" - U2
"Seven special welcomes will replace the seven towers, Grey graffiti concrete transforms to gentle flowers" - Manzone, Ballymun Men's Centre
Inside a 15-storey tower, a woman and a small boy are waiting for the lift. As the door opens, the boy races ahead. Alarmed, she shouts: "Don't touch the walls!" In the lift, she looks at us and with an embarrassed shrug, says: "Hold your noses". We're already standing clear of the walls without knowing why, but it's clear why we should hold our noses; the lift floor is awash with urine. As we ascend 13 storeys in silence, trying not to inhale the stench, she murmurs: "And it's not the kids who do it".
Is she in line for a new house? "In about three years," she says. Then on an angry sigh: "I can't last that long".
Down at Tesco, shoppers so bold as to need a trolley must pay a £5 deposit. At the AIB bank, the queue, as usual, is out the door.
And yet the place is teeming with the promise of better times. Ballymun is one great building site, as the first phase of an extraordinary £1.5 billion vision shimmers finally within the people's grasp. Time - measured out in legal challenges, bad weather, the Health and Safety Authority's sites' shutdown, the shuddering economy - is the enemy now, moments stolen from that yearned-for new life.
For Michelle and Gary O'Meara, that new life is tantalisingly close; Gary can see the roof of their new home from the flat in the shockingly bleak block in Balcurris. The couple have been packed and ready for months. New appliances remain in their cartons, ready for unveiling in the snug, three-bedroom, two-storey house on a small in-fill development a few hundreds yard away in Belclare. "This is like winning the lotto", says Michelle, a part-time waitress.
The houses in Belclare are desirable by any standard, but "this" is about more than a private entrance and driveway, own garden (front and rear) and room for a dog. It's about being able to relax your guard, about your two young sons being free to wander their own neighbourhood, to play in the safely overlooked park situated at the end of your friendly, neighbourhood road.
This assumes startling significance when it emerges that routinely, every day for 10 years, the O'Mearas have taken their children out of the area. "As soon as I get them from school, we're gone and we're gone till dark. We go to the beach or they play with the kids around my mother's," says Michelle.
"We just like to keep ourselves to ourselves," says Gary by way of explanation.
Chris lives nearby and, providing we don't use his real name ("they know what my car looks like"), expands a little. "It's the anti-social behaviour - that's what the Corporation calls drug-pushing. You can't get rid of them out of the flats, there are too many of them. They rule."
From Chris's tone, we may infer that "they" will rule no more. "We know most of the people moving to our estate and they're not going to put up with any of that. You can hear it at the meetings. You can have more control over people in a house than in a block of flats. Our new neighbours there have already checked us out. That's the way it's going to be."
The O'Mearas are not unique. Pat Turner lives near the top of a 15-storey tower with his wife, Lisa, and five-year-old son, Graham. "Graham has never been outside that flat door on his own. You never know what's going on in those landings at night."
Pat, a sterilising technician at Beaumont Hospital, knows his social and political history. He recalls the disastrous effect of the housing grants which enabled many working people to buy private houses out of the area and their replacement with some of the State's most intractable problem families and individuals.
"It was the people of Ballymun who had to deal with those problems thrown on their doorstep without any back-up," says Pat. "Every area has similar problems. It was just easier for the State to hide them in Ballymun."
But optimism reigns in the Turners' neat flat: Ballymun's all-conquering soccer club, the ambitious recycling project being developed with the Corporation, and - not least - the family's imminent move to a new house where the first dividend will be privacy (Graham won't have to share his parents' bedroom).
Their list of purchases for the new house - curtains, tiles, furniture and so on - is on the fridge door, each individually priced and a constant reminder of where they stand.
After losing her job in the Gateway shut-down, Lisa found another the next day in Cadbury's, the downside being night-shifts through the weekends. Like the O'Mearas, the Turners plan to get a mortgage and buy their new home; the carrot is the 3 per cent discount off the market value for every year living in the flats.
With a valuation of around £125,000 on the three-bed houses, minus their 30 per cent discount, they will be able to acquire one for around £85,000.
Their determination to make it work almost cuts the air. "Ownership as a state of mind was never there in the flats," says Pat Turner. "But if you have a front door, how it appears and the area around it is down to you."
Soon, if all goes to plan, there will be many more like them.
The breadth of change sweeping Ballymun is staggering. Thirteen building sites litter its 600 acres. Some 5,000 new homes, in five distinct neighbourhoods, are in the pipeline, popping up in neat, in-fill developments or in streets and crescents whose relationship to existing houses will only be evident when the towers and blocks come down. Next year, the first of the towers will tumble. Within eight to 10 years, Ballymun's skyline will be humanised as all seven towers and the 29 ugly blocks gradually disappear.
There was a time when the only privately-owned homes in Ballymun were the three Catholic presbyteries and, though private occupancy has since climbed to 20 per cent, the local authority still owns 80 per cent of homes, the precise reverse of the State average. The strategy is to make that figure 50/50 within eight years, an ambitious target in an area where, officially, lone parents comprise 60 per cent of a typical high-rise block. To promote the mix, independent housing association and co-op projects are being encouraged; at least three such projects are underway.
A remarkable feature of the Ballymun project is the intensive engagement of residents in decision-making about their new homes and communities. Within limits, they can choose their paint colours, fireplaces and kitchen cupboards, as well as shrubs and a tree for the garden.
But at an earlier stage, they may also choose from a couple of developments and neighbourhoods (each with its own distinctive house design and layout, the work of 13 architect companies); are involved in the naming of their roads; and have an input into the creation of local parks and playgrounds. They can even name a neighbour they favour to move in nearby; and they have the option of naming those they don't want. (To no one's surprise, the same names emerge time and again.)
"It's like a fairytale," says Rose Ormsby, a tranquil 31-year-old, and mother of four-year-old April. Their excitement isn't hard to fathom. They've been able to see their new home grow from their balcony. Their favoured neighbours will be living two doors away and there's the garden, the accessibility (their current home is eight flights up) and bonuses such as controllable central heating.
Centrally-controlled boilers mean that for residents baking in temperatures as high as 31 degrees, the only resort is to open a window.
"You'd see a lot of chest problems and asthma at the change of the seasons - something my mother always put down to the heating", says Rose. And because the flats were built without insulation, their energy consumption is 28 per cent higher than the city average.
In their well-insulated, double-glazed new houses, residents - accustomed to having the £4 heating charge incorporated in the rent - will be responsible for their own energy costs, payable by pre-paid swipe cards.
This is just one of myriad issues thrashed out in the revolutionary Transition Programme organised by various organisations, including Ballymun Regeneration Ltd (BRL) and the Ballymun Housing Taskforce, to help people to adapt to their new lives.
On the programme, they get a chance to meet their new neighbours, to get information about their new houses, costs and budgeting, to go on site tours, get advice about maintenance, safety and security issues and, above all, how to build new communities.
It's a chance to air their ideas, worries and grievances, which initially boiled down to a desire to be kept informed about the project, get advice on security and attend classes in gardening and interior design.
"It began with people being so excited about their own house and the details around that, but then it became very much about community, training and setting up their own groups," says Rose Ormsby, a facilitator with the Transition Programme. "There's about a 50 per cent attendance rate. It's a pity more don't come; people get so much out of it."
It depends how you look at it. A 50 per cent attendance is no shame in an area where only 10 per cent of the population turns out to vote, says Ciarβn Murray, managing director of BRL, the company set up to direct and implement the vision. "At the beginning, I wanted it to be compulsory for anyone moving in phase one; I thought it was that important, but 'compulsory' has bad connotations in an area like this.
"But the programme has been recognised widely as one of the real success stories, in that it gives a real insight into thinking and understanding - and in many senses, is about transferring responsibility, getting across the fact that Ballymun is not just the Corporation's responsibility or that law and order is not just the Garda's responsibility and that the community is a vitally important part of that process."
It is an "incredibly ambitious" programme, he says, and already paying dividends in the emergence through it of "a new breed of young, articulate, local leadership who are grasping the new vision, which is prepared to set the rules and decide what is acceptable on the new estates".
And for all that, it's still only an element of Ballymun's big picture.
As 12 new purpose-built playgrounds reach the end of the planning stage, the new Arts and Community Resource Centre, AXIS, is already open for business ("a benchmark for quality and design", in the words of Sheena McCambley, senior planner). It's a warm, inviting landmark building containing a 200-seat theatre, training rooms, a crΦche, a recording studio and offices for community groups as well as a cheerful, aromatic cafΘ-bar.
"This is part of the fairytale", says Rose Ormsby. "It's a luxury place to bring people, it's homely, bright and cheerful - and that's a change for Ballymun."
Outside, a new Main Street is being built from scratch; the mighty skeleton of the £40-million, four-storey Civic Centre is already standing with a five-storey sport and leisure centre to come, as well as shops, offices, private apartments and basement car-parks.
The new streets can be designed to accommodate the LUAS - which will run directly in front of the Civic Centre - rather than the other way round.
And finally, to meet the criteria for a truly integrated town, where the quality of life means accessible work as well as decent facilities, amenities and housing, there is the 100-acre plot with its desirable M50 frontage, designated as the £600-million Business and Technology Park.
It's all been a long time coming, although, on the face of it, the brief was simple: find the money, rehouse the residents, demolish the towers, provide facilities.
There were models for such massive redevelopment elsewhere, as in the Glasgow Gorbals and Waltham Forest in Essex, but neither of these was required to keep vast communities intact and in situ over five neighbourhoods while the work proceeded.
"Keeping the community together was a major part of the challenge and will continue to be," says McCambley. "This is, in a sense, a conservation exercise."
Some of the characters may have to be dead before the full, unexpurgated account can be written about how this historic pass has been reached. Four years of helter-skelter, seven-days-a-week intensity for BRL; four years of a battle for credibility in an area diseased with official neglect, betrayal and false dawns for more than three decades; four years of an exquisitely delicate dance between BRL, Dublin Corporation, the Garda, hard-working community leaders and up to 20,000 residents, involving 2,500 meetings and a million different agendas, a few of them not as transparent as they might be.
'The biggest difficulty," says McCambley, "is that so many demands are made on you - and that there are so many people who can place individual demands." And although the staff of BRL, by the look of them, have pulled out all the stops, even still, an entrenched mistrust seethes around them.
"Trust is the big issue. You're constantly fighting for credibility," says Eamon Farrelly, the contracts manager. "In November 1997," he continues as though the date is graven in his soul, "I was an innocent coming into this. A lady came to me and said: 'Oh, it'll never happen.' I know now that it's because there had been so many false dawns for them; I just didn't know it at the time."
Farrelly, whose brief places him on the coalface day and night, confesses to being "surprised by some of the intensity of opposition to different aspects". Have things improved?
Ciarβn Murray, the managing director, seems doubtful. "I would have said that, four years on, we have done what we promised," he says. "We held out a vision for a new Ballymun, based on quality and involvement in the whole decision-making process. I'd have expected that having attended 2,500 meetings in three and a half years, all at night, and having put houses of quality on the ground, that they'd see by now that we are the good guys, that the promises are becoming reality.
"But we still feel that, while we certainly To.. Weekend 3