NEIGHBORHOODS : Cultures Clash in Dublin’s Temple Bar District : Tradition meets trendy in the Irish capital’s revitalized riverfront.

The music ringing down the medieval streets of the Temple Bar district is thundering post-punk rock. Everywhere here, the ongoing cultural clash in Ireland of old and new is glaringly apparent. That clash, in fact, is the source of Temple Bar’s excitement as Dublin’s newest shopping district and restaurant quarter.

An appropriate entrance to Temple Bar takes a visitor on foot through Merchants Arch, which meets the south side of the Liffey River at the picturesque wrought-iron span of Ha’Penny Bridge. A cool, narrow tunnel of soot-blackened granite, Merchants Arch and the surrounding streetscape date from late medieval Dublin. Further within Temple Bar, 20th-Century shopkeepers sell tie-dyed clothing, leather jackets and the latest rock music, but just inside Merchants Arch, a young man sits by a stoop offering to tell fortunes. The vignette seems as medieval as the architecture.

But time has hardly stood still in Temple Bar, which was named for Sir William Temple (1554-1628), whose mansions and gardens occupied the site with a walkway or “bar” along the Liffey. Today, Temple Bar combines fashionable shops and an array of restaurants with international cuisines in a busy four-block-square area of narrow cobblestone streets and medieval lanes.

In the southern part of the area, at the head of a sloping hill leading from Merchants Arch up the length of graffiti-decorated Crown Alley, looms a 10-story concrete behemoth, the modern headquarters of the Central Bank of Ireland. A local in a Crown Alley record shop likens the bleak bank building to a stranded spaceship. As a symbol of the future, though, the bank is nearly a generation out of date. Over the years since the bank’s construction, brick and cobblestones have returned to fashion, bringing with them a more human scale and feeling to cities everywhere across Europe.

From the 1960s, the Irish government transportation service, C.I.E., had eyed Temple Bar as the site for a massive seven-acre central bus station in Dublin. But the preservationists and business owners who set up shops and restaurants in the area, despite the government’s impending “death sentence,” began lobbying against the bus station project in the late ‘80s. They pointed to similar historic areas such as London’s Covent Garden and New York’s SoHo, which were revitalized by attracting businesses from outside the mainstream. Save Temple Bar, they predicted, and the same could happen for Dublin.

The economic argument proved successful. Last year, the Temple Bar Development Council convinced the government to establish special tax incentives for the area’s recovery. In addition, legislation created a corporation to purchase from C.I.E. and the city all property previously designated for the new bus station. Ironically, official government signs throughout the area now hail Temple Bar as one of Dublin’s most significant historic districts and soon to be a major tourist attraction.

Temple Bar seems decidedly in the midst of transition. On Fownes Street, when I was there last June, Pasta Nostra, an attractive and admittedly trendy Italian restaurant, was open to booming business beside the Scout Shop, a quaint survivor from some past era whose window was clogged with hunting knives and knapsacks. A block away on Crow Street, the Well Red Bookshop, which stocks postcards declaring, “support aboriginal land rights,” stood several doors away from Tante Zoe, a popular Cajun restaurant where the only thing red is the beans.

The Well Red Bookshop and its companion vegetarian restaurant, the Well Fed Cafe, are longtime tenants of the Dublin Resources Center, a private agency established in 1984 to assist unemployed young people. Bookshop owner Mary Tracey remembers moving in when Temple Bar “was a shell. The place was dead; it was all empty warehouses and empty buildings.”

Well Red’s shelves are a treasury of contemporary Irish literature, from “The Snapper,” a novel by Roddy Doyle, 34-year-old author of “The Commitments,” to a 100-page “Pocket History of Ireland” by Breandan O’h Either. After seven years of hard work, Tracey looks favorably enough on the arrival of newcomers, but she is concerned that government-led preservation efforts in Temple Bar may not go so far as to preserve low rents.

“It’s people like us who got this area looking like it does now, and the change is brilliant,” says Tracey, proudly. “But I don’t want to see us pushed out by higher rents.”

The economic tug-of-war between urban pioneers and gentry-come-latelys is familiar to city residents throughout the world. Dublin’s Temple Bar, however, would seem to have some length to go before there is genuine concern for its character. The old and the new, in various shapes throughout Temple Bar, lie casually and not yet threateningly side by side.

Much the same would seem true of Irish society in general. For centuries an outpost of Europe, Ireland has maintained more thoroughly than anywhere on the Continent a traditional, if somewhat parochial, culture. Ireland approaches the next century, however, with half its population under the age of 25. Clairvoyance is hardly necessary to predict that whatever shape Ireland takes in the coming years, it will have difficulty remaining entirely a traditional society.

Temple Bar’s cosmopolitan atmosphere may certainly be a foretaste of the “new” Ireland. Only five years ago, when I first visited the city, one would have considered “cosmopolitan Dublin” an oxymoron. Lunch at a Dublin pub in those days was a ham sandwich with butter on white bread, all of it wrapped in cellophane; dinner choices, too, were limited. On last summer’s visit, and concentrating entirely in Temple Bar, I was able to enjoy a different, and well-prepared, cuisine--Portugese, Creole, Italian, Irish--every night for almost a week.

At Little Lisbon, on Fownes Street near the corner of Dame Street, chef Robert Doyle has returned to Dublin from travels in Portugal and its former African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, to prepare such exotic dishes as gimbal udang , a baked shrimp with coconut filling, and bobotie , a spicy hot curried beef casserole. The frequently crowded restaurant is cozily decorated with Iberian curtains and African prints. As I enjoyed an appetizer plate of homemade spiced sausages, I was reminded of visits to the Portuguese countryside. Dinner for my friend and me was about $50, and one is well advised to save room for the homemade coconut ice cream, a voluptuously sweet confection.

Tante Zoe specializes in Cajun food, including the usual jambalaya, red beans and rice, and succeeds well enough. With its red walls and intentionally poor lighting, the restaurant tries hard for a seedy New Orleans atmosphere, though it may resemble more a movie set than a true Crescent City eatery. Jazz and zydeco music chugged along in the background. We concluded dinner--which with wine came to about $55 for two--with steaming hot espresso coffees, and there was, for me at least, a perverse kind of pleasure in ordering espresso in once-untrendy Dublin.

Venturing to explore something labeled as “traditional Irish” fare, we were excited to discover the unlikely named preparation, “boxty,” at Gallagher’s Boxty House on the Temple Bar lane, where we ate without wine for about $40. This now well-known restaurant opened in late 1989, heralding a movement in Ireland to update and revitalize traditional cooking styles.

Originally prepared in the west of Ireland, a boxty is a potato crepe rolled with vegetable, lamb, beef or smoked cod, and served with a variety of sauces. Gallagher’s is heavily but attractively decorated with country furniture and knickknacks, and is popular both with Dubliner families and visitors. Expect a half-hour wait; the host will direct you to bide your time at the pleasant Auld Dubliner pub across the lane.

The quintessential Irish pub, the Auld Dub’ serves pints of stout and lager to poets (we spotted Seamus Heaney) and football fans alike. One night, for a change from Guinness, I tried a pint of Beamish, a less well-known Irish stout. It was lighter and sweeter than the old standby and a welcome change on a warm summer evening.

Shops in Temple Bar focus on the post-punk, post-modernist obsessions with hippie clothing--tie-dyed shirts, patched jeans, leather caps and jackets--as well as brightly patterned, loose-fitting styles inspired by the Third World.

Purple Haze, which was opened on Crown Alley at the beginning of 1991 by Pearse Dolan, a former County Dublin farmer, and Linda Ross, who had worked in the wholesale clothing industry, features an intriguing selection of jewelry and accessories. A collection of handmade hats and caps, sewn of recycled leather, was especially striking.

Next door at the 4-year-old Revolution and its partner shop, Damascus, co-owner Brenda Dodd carries only recycled clothing from linen pajamas to jeans jackets. Bomber-style jackets of recycled draperies stood out as particularly distinct. They started at about $75,but dresses, shirts, pajamas and other items began at $18.

“We travel all over England and Ireland to find our things,” Dodd says. “We buy in small lots and that suits the kids. They don’t want to see what they’re wearing all over town.”

At night along Crown Alley, rock bands practice in lofts overhead, their members, no doubt, hoping to repeat U2’s success. Covent Garden Rock Cafe, a restaurant and music bar, features the best of local music nightly. The first Covent Garden Rock Cafe opened in London, Dodd said, and there are copycat cafes in Amsterdam and Tokyo.

About the only place one may expect to hear traditional Irish music in Temple Bar is at 7-year-old Claddagh Records on Cecilia Street, touted as “Ireland’s Specialist Folk and Ethnic Music Shop.” Owner Finbar Boyle promises that his store stocks recordings “you can’t get at home.” Home, it turns out, though, could be almost anywhere. Claddagh certainly has a thorough collection of Irish music, but many other cultures are represented in its bins and shelves, including Scottish, African and South American.

The clash on view in Dublin’s Temple Bar between old and new images of Ireland, and equally, what it means to be Irish, may owe its origins to what was once the country’s misfortune.

Ever since the Potato Famine, Ireland’s most successful export has been its people, driven from home by economic hardship.

In the 1980s, that emigration trend continued at record levels. But with the recent collapse of once-strong economies in London, Boston and other areas, which had attracted young Irish men and women like magnets with the promise of work, the emigrants have begun to return home. They bring with them to Dublin and Ireland a new, worldly outlook. They also bring home Portuguese and Creole recipes, African music and the blues--and the clothing styles found in London shops, a visitor finds in Temple Bar.

GUIDEBOOK

Temptations of Temple Bar

Where to eat:

Gallagher’s Boxty House, 20-21 Temple Bar; telephone locally 772-762. Open Monday-Sunday, 12:30 p.m.-11 p.m.

Little Lisbon, 2 Fownes St.; 711-274. Open daily, 5-11 p.m. Diners may bring their own wine.

Tante Zoe’s, 1 Crow St.; 649-4407. Open for lunch Monday-Saturday, noon-3 p.m., dinner Monday-Sunday, 6 p.m.-midnight.

Well Fed Cafe, Dublin Resource Centre, 6 Crow St.; 771-974. Monday, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.

Where to shop:

Claddagh Records, 2 Cecilia St.; 770-262. Monday-Saturday, noon-5:30 p.m.

Purple Haze, 1 Crown Alley. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Revolution/Damascus, 2 Crown Alley; 679-7087. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Well Red Bookshop, Dublin Resource Centre, 6 Crow St.; 771-974. Open Monday-Wednesday and Friday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.

For more information: For general information about Dublin, contact the Irish Tourist Board, 757 3rd Ave., 19th Floor, New York 10017, (800) 223-6470 or (212) 418-0800.

To receive a pre-visit copy of “The Penny Chronicle,” write Temple Bar Properties, 20 E. Essex St., Dublin 2, Ireland.