New Buildings Compared to Wartime Bunkers : Dubliners Fear Development Will Destroy Their City’s Identity

Twin granite blocks of Dublin’s new City Hall, partly obscuring the medieval Christchurch Cathedral, have set a controversy raging among Dubliners over how their city should look.

One side says Dublin must build with the times.

The other says it is being destroyed by developers.

With scores of multistory buildings rearing up over the past 25 years, redevelopment threatens Dublin’s identity as one of Europe’s most intact 18th-Century cities.

It is still an intimate capital, distinguished by cobblestone streets, Georgian squares, manicured parks, seductive pubs and low-landscaped terraces along the River Liffey.

But hundreds of elegant Georgian buildings with their arched, columned doorways, high-ceilinged rooms and iron-grilled forecourts have been swept away.

Dating from the reigns of the four King Georges of England (1714-1830), many had fallen into disrepair, with some turned into tenement housing for the poor.

O’Connell Street, the main thoroughfare, is shorn of its old-fashioned splendor, cluttered now with fast-food restaurants, neon signs, mirror-glass and concrete facades.

Mistakes Were Made

The Dublin Corp., the city’s metropolitan authority, doesn’t deny that mistakes were made.

Spokesman Declan McCulloch blames them on the mood of the 1960s, when Ireland was graduating from a sleepy agrarian society to a modern industrial state and joining the European Common Market.

“There was an awful lot of development in the city at a very, very fast rate,” he said. “Ireland was growing with the times.”

But to Frank McDonald, an Irish Times journalist, it was “The Destruction of Dublin”--the title he chose for a best-selling book that has crystallized the controversy and made it a talking point at Dublin dinner parties.

“The city is really at the most critical point in its recent history, the point at which it can either be saved or totally destroyed,” McDonald said in an interview.

He charges that the replacement of classic Georgian and Victorian architecture with office blocks was permitted by corrupt government officials who granted planning permission to developers “simply interested in making money as fast as possible.”

The 71-year-old Niall Montgomery, one of Dublin’s most respected architects, laments the change in Dublin: “There’s nothing in it but trash. It’s a heap.”

Today a metropolis for nearly one-third of Ireland’s 3.5 million people, Dublin originated as a settlement on marshes known as Dubh Linn (Dark Pool).

The Vikings turned it into a naval base and capital 1,000 years ago, and it reached its heyday in the 1700s. But it declined into a provincial backwater after 1800 when Ireland was made a part of Britain and Dublin ceased to be a capital city.

Although celebrated in song-- ‘Twas in Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty, that I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone --Dublin nevertheless has never been universally loved for its looks:

- Novelist Sean O’Casey described the houses on a typical Dublin street as “a long, lurching row of discontented incurables, smirched with age-long marks of ague, fever, cancer and consumption, the soured tears of little children, and the sighs of disappointed newly married girls.”

- Playwright Brendan Behan complained: “In Dublin you have conviviality, but no friendship, and Dublin will give you loneliness too--but no solitude.”

- Compliments are often backhanded: “Dublin, though a place much worse than London, is not so bad as Iceland,” wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1791. More recently, novelist Edna O’Brien observed: “Dublin is still the most congenial city to be poor in.”

By the 1960s, parts of Dublin were so grim that the East Berlin scenes of the movie “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” were shot there.

This image had given the city an inferiority complex, journalist McDonald said.

“The fact that we didn’t have any high-rise buildings made people feel that Dublin was somehow emasculated.”

The Dublin Corp.’s decision to build the City Hall at Wood Quay on the Liffey gave Ireland’s late-blooming environmentalists cause to complain.

The discovery of Viking and Norman remains on the land provoked calls for its preservation as a national monument.

But not even environmentalist rallies and a High Court injunction could stop the corporation. It bulldozed the site, and only then allowed an incomplete excavation of what was left, McDonald wrote. Now, spiraling costs have delayed plans to build a Viking museum under the City Hall complex.

Giant Beehives

Critics complain that the $27-million buildings--one eight stories, the other 10--resemble giant beehives or wartime bunkers and clash with the part-Gothic Christchurch Cathedral, a chief tourist attraction.

Architect Sam Stephenson, whose modernistic designs went into the City Hall, said the severe prismatic shapes “are meant to be a very strong statement . . . that this is the seat of the city government.”

He predicted that “in about 40 or 50 years you’ll find people clamoring for the preservation of some of the buildings that are going up now.”

Pop singer Bob Geldof, the fund-raiser for famine victims, enlivened the debate by declaring at a civic reception last year that his native city contained “the most mediocre, unaesthetic, architecturally inarticulate buildings I’ve ever seen in my life.”

His audience, which included the lord mayor, was shocked as Geldof railed at the “backhanders, political corruption and moral degradation” he held responsible.

His speech made headlines. Popular pressure has since forced the Dublin Corp. to shelve street-widening plans that would have meant demolishing hundreds of old buildings, particularly along the river.

The Irish government recently promised the equivalent of $13 million for a city-center face lift. It has also earmarked the riverfront, the decaying Georgian enclave of Henrietta Street and the north inner city for restoration.

“There are enough people out there who want Dublin to be saved,” McDonald said. “It’s become a big political issue and the politicians are now without exception making the right noises.”

But conservation is costly, and Montgomery sees little hope of change.

“There isn’t the will and there isn’t the money,” the architect said.