But the truth about Temple Bar is that it has turned out the way nobody expected, let alone planned. From the mid-1970s, CIE was acquiring the core of the area for a transport centre, with a city bus station below street level topped by shopping malls, hotels and office blocks. The big mistake it made was to rent out space to "alternative" clothes shops, art galleries, restaurants and rock-band rehearsal studios.
They created the bohemian phenomenon that gave rise to the whole initiative to "save" the area. And yet, ironically, "this thing that was the genesis of Temple Bar was destroyed in the making of Temple Bar," in the words of Owen Hickey, onetime chartered surveyor with CIE who was head-hunted to become TBP's first property director. "The very thing that everyone wanted to save was lost."
Of course, as seen in on previous experience with gentrification in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston and Covent Garden in London, this was almost inevitable. Temple Bar was bound to be changed by the influx of millions of pounds in public and private sector investment.
In May 1991, the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, told the Dail that the objective of the development of Temple Bar "is to build on what has been taking place spontaneously in the area and to create a lovely, bustling cultural and tourist quarter which people will visit in significant numbers and in which many more will work and live". That goal, indeed, formed the basis of TBP's "mission statement".
Magahy, who took over from Paddy Teahon as TBP's managing director in 1993 and quickly became "Ms Temple Bar", says it "could never have been everything to everybody". In many ways, its renewal mirrored the immense change in Ireland's fortunes over the past decade; even the proliferation of Internet cafes and reducedrate telephone call shops reflects the current dot com economy.
Gone are days when you could drop in to the Dublin Resource Centre (DRC) and have a veggie lunch for £2.50, as Maeve Jennings, former development manager with TBP, wistfully recalls. "That era of Temple Bar was full of grit and humour, but we've lost the ability to poke fun at ourselves." The DRC, a bohemian lynchpin for 15 years, was replaced by a fish restaurant that lasted barely six months. Temple Bar doesn't have many ordinary shops because the rents are so high. Retailing in the area has proved difficult, with several major casualties such as Padania, the upmarket, but short-lived, Italian deli on Cecilia Street; it is now a coffee bar run by Paula Gillick who dreams of moving to Italy. Next door, a health food outlet was replaced (briefly) by a fruit and vegetable store and, more recently, a sex shop.
Who is to blame? The Department of Finance, for one. Its senior officials were so terrified by the Temple Bar initiative that they insisted, as a quid pro quo for funding the capital cost of the cultural centres, TBP would have to make a commercial return on all of its residential and retail projects. In Hickey's view, this onerous requirement had "huge consequences and did extraordinary damage to the area".
It precluded numerous desirable developments, such as student housing, a Dublin version of the English Market in Cork and the idea of making retail units available rent-free for three years, until clients found their feet; instead, rents were fixed by TBP at normal commercial rates, with five-year "upward only" reviews, and the units sold on to private investors who then cashed in on lucrative tax incentives.
Apartments in the area also became very expensive, even allowing for the massive increase in Dublin property prices over the past five years. In 1995, it was possible to buy a flat from TBP on a "first come, first served" basis for less than £150 per square foot. This year, one-bedroom apartments in the West End, including the admittedly exceptional Wooden Building, were sold by tender for up to £500 per square foot. Inevitably, by selling these flats to the highest bidders, most of them ended up in the hands of investors, rather than owner-occupiers - an outcome described as "shameful" by one angry resident, Neil Cooke. For him, it represented "the final betrayal of the vision of a residential community" in Temple Bar - though the profits generated at least enabled TBP to retain up to 10 apartments for use by visiting artists.
Nine years ago, in a wideranging address to the Society of Chartered Surveyors, Hickey said his greatest hope for le grand projet was that it would be accessible to "ordinary people". And he warned that if all the residential units in Temple Bar were sold to "single people in their 30s with 320i BMWs in the garage", it might be a success in property development terms, but he would regard it as a failure.
Paul Gallagher, who has been running the Temple Bar Pharmacy in East Essex Street since 1995, knows the area and its people better than most. He says the sense of community is strongest not in the overpriced private apartment schemes, but in Crampton Buildings and Smock Alley Court, where all the residents are tenants of Dublin Corporation. They show that "social housing" can be sociable, too.
In Crampton Buildings, the residents even have a "wormery", where kitchen waste and garden clippings are turned into compost, providing an organic feed for all the trees and shrubs in its oasis-like courtyard. No wonder it is cited as a model by Greening Temple Bar, an early TBP initiative, which is currently co-ordinating a new waste and noise management plan for the area by ERM environmental consultants.
The Green Building, with its wind turbines and solar panels on the roof, and the recycling of excess heat from the Civic Offices to provide a district heating system for the "West End" were important initiatives. But the huge generation of waste in Temple Bar needs to be tackled, not least by finding an alternative to the "Eurobins" clogging the footpaths. As for the cultural centres, architect Joan O'Connor is not alone in believing that there are too many of them. "It's like going into a supermarket and getting all the nice bits, jamming them in and trying to make it work," she says. "For the cherries to shine in a cake, the mix must be good. And in Temple Bar, there is just too much costume jewellery pretending to be gems. It's all too self-conscious, even hysterical."
Facilities such as Arthouse and DesignYard, which don't have the option of selling drink to supplement their income, teeter on the brink of viability; Arthouse, the multi-media centre, has been through three directors in five years and still hasn't found its niche. And the Project, another lynchpin of old Temple Bar, would have relocated to Smithfield if it hadn't been threatened with the loss of its Arts Council grant.
Magahy insists that the cultural centres all pay their way, some earn through sponsorship or commercial activities, others through grants; they are not the "white elephants" that some predicted. She also points out that a total of 65 cultural organisations are now based in Temple Bar, compared to just 17 when the project started, and says it is "complete nonsense" that a whole lot of artists had to flee the area.
Loose ends that still need to be tied up include the completion of Temple Bar Square, where a compulsory purchase order is being considered to develop the ad hoc "beer garden" attached to the Quays pub. But whatever its faults, as Karl Kent, one of An Bord Pleanala's planning inspectors, concluded in his report on Spencer Dock, Temple Bar "has been the most successful urban redevelopment in the city to date".
Magahy, who has set up her own consultancy to manage other projects such as the relocation of Temple Street Children's Hospital to the Mater site in Eccles Street, says it will take a few years for the area to settle down. Temple Bar will not be the same without her. How does she feel about it? "I suppose I feel like a mother who knows all her child's best bits and worst bits and still fiercely defends it."