TO BE YOUNG AND IN DUBLIN

Above all other locales in the Republic of Ireland, the neighborhood of Temple Bar--wedged between Trinity College and the River Liffey--is where culture is cultivated and hell is raised, though not necessarily in that order.

To find it, head for the middle of Dublin. You can begin on Grafton Street, Dublin’s main shopping avenue, and follow the din toward the Liffey, where the arch of the old Ha’Penny Bridge leads to Merchants’ Arch. Duck through the arch and you stand in a warren of narrow streets, trendy pedestrians and many-hued storefronts.

Fifteen years ago, that passage under the arch led into one of the most dismal neighborhoods in Dublin, beginning with a parking lot. But changes have been made. It’s now considered the trendiest part of town, an exciting and essentially young place that’s become the city’s official arts zone, home to some of Dublin’s best night spots, restaurants and shops.

“There’s so much talent here,” an aspiring photographer named Mark Begley told me one afternoon last fall. We sat in the Globe pub, about half a block from the official edge of Temple Bar.

Begley, 28, had a tattooed bicep, a bohemian bearing and a fairly serious case of civic enthusiasm.

“We never had a ‘60s here, not the way London did or the States did,” he said. “We’ve skipped two decades in five years. . . .It’s just blossoming.”

Step into Temple Bar Square on a Thursday night and you face some hard choices. Your next move might be an hour or two of pub music, a dance club or an art-film screening at the Irish Film Centre (completed 1992). There might be a sculpture exhibit opening at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (opened 1994) or a pop music performance at the Temple Bar Music Centre (opened 1996). For me one night, it was the Dublin Musical Theatre Players’ production of “Hot Mikado”--Gilbert and Sullivan’s songs recast into soul, swing and gospel, with occasional tap-dancing and very loud costumes.

Another night, I climbed upstairs in Oliver St. John Gogarty’s pub and was immediately enveloped by what seemed a traditional music session.

“No, no, a thousand times no! I’d rather see my own lifeblood spillin’,” a bearish guitarist sang to the giddy, elbow-to-elbow crowd. “I’ll sing any song except ‘God Save the Queen,’ and I won’t sing any Bob Dylan!”

OK, a neo-traditional music session.

Of course, you might want food before your tap-dancing and Dylan-bashing. In Temple Bar, that might mean Bruno’s for elegant continental cuisine in a hushed dining room, or the Mermaid Cafe for grilled-pear and toasted-herb appetizers. If you’re feeling literary or nostalgic, it might mean Bewley’s Cafe on Westmoreland Street, a cafeteria and writerly gathering place that dates to the 19th century.

On the day of my arrival for four days in Dublin last summer, my choice was a place on Meeting House Square called Eden. The cuisine was nouvelle Irish (organic lamb’s liver, grilled quail with honey grape sauce). The high tiled walls of strictly patterned blue and white and beige led me to suspect, after all that air travel and a glass or two of wine, that I was dining in the deep end of an Encino swimming pool.

But it was a fine meal. And just outside, Meeting House Square was just as oddly impressive.

By day the square is a pedestrian plaza (another former parking lot), housing a modest food market on Saturday mornings. On summer nights, however, authorities frequently drag in chairs, reroute foot traffic and treat the space as a theater or concert hall, using an indoor/outdoor stage built into the wall of an adjoining children’s cultural center. One night I joined a crowd of about 650 to hear an hour of Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky and company from an alfresco orchestra. The next night I was back again, my chair turned 90 degrees to the right, to watch a free screening of the 1991 film version of Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s novel “The Commitments” on the big blank wall of the Gallery of Photography (opened 1995), a full moon rising behind it.

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Not so long ago, the 28 acres of Temple Bar were as moribund as a neighborhood could be. The district takes its name from an early owner, Sir William Temple, who acquired it in the 1500s. The term “bar” referred to a riverside walkway, so the area was known as Temple’s Bar. Among the city’s oldest areas, it has seen a striking array of historic moments, from the first Celtic settlements on the riverbanks (about 300 BC) to the concert hall on Fishamble Street (now a hotel) where Handel’s “Messiah” was first performed in 1742, to the construction of the Ha’Penny Bridge in 1816. But in the 1960s, after suburbanization had drained much of the vitality from the area, Temple Bar was condemned to death by public works.

The national transportation agency resolved to buy up the neighborhood, raze 10 of the 28 acres and put up a big bus station just as soon as the government could scrape up the necessary funds.

Fortunately, those funds were hard to find. Fifteen years later the neighborhood was still largely derelict. But in the interim, along came a few artists and bohemian entrepreneurs to adopt the neighborhood for its low rents. One that remains on Crown Alley is the Bad Ass Cafe, which opened in 1983 and survived by serving cheap meals to students from nearby Trinity College, and for a while employed an aspiring singer named Sinead O’Connor.

These urban settlers then raised a few immodest proposals to preserve the neighborhood’s life. Eventually, local and national officials took up the cause, too, with a “renewal and development act” in 1991. With it came a bushel full of cash and credit from the European Union. Then, in the mid-’90s, the Irish economy surged.

On the first afternoon of my visit, I stopped at a window on Crown Alley and peered in at the scarred wood floor of the Eamonn Doran gallery (next to the restaurant and pub of the same name). There, beneath walls of garish orange, 25-year-old, yellow-haired Shane Bainbridge sprawled with a spray can, adding color to an abstract artwork on the floor. He seemed a perfect example of young Dublin in its heyday, until he opened his mouth. He was from Independence, Iowa.

About two years ago, his brother got a job working in Ireland for the computer company Gateway 2000, Bainbridge said, and he “just dropped school and came over.” One of the reasons Bainbridge loved this part of Dublin was its international flavor. He pointed to his friends, arranged on the gallery floor in a Day-Glo boho tableau.

“This right here,” said Bainbridge, “is France, Italy, New Zealand and America. That’s how it is.”

Two blocks over and two days later, I stood by a 24-year-old named Jim Dowling in a teeming pub. Dowling was a Dubliner, raised in the city’s suburbs. He’d gone away to college and landed a good job as a computer scientist in Heidelberg, Germany. But he kept hearing such incredible good news from home: New jobs by the thousands, thanks to high-tech companies lured by low taxes. Massive investments by the EU in public facilities. Booming tourism revenues. Peace talks in the north.

“I was in Germany,” Dowling said. “And I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to miss this nice moment in Irish history.’ ” So he found a comparable job and came back.

Many of Ireland’s leading arts groups, including the nation’s top acting school and the photographic archive of the National Library of Ireland, have moved into Temple Bar. About $65 million in subsidies from the Irish government and the European Union has been sunk into the neighborhood, along with another $100 million in loans from the Bank of Ireland and the EU and an estimated $160 million in private investment. In the last seven years, 140 new businesses have opened or moved in, and the residential population has jumped from about 150 to 1,400.

The next phase of redevelopment, to be completed by this fall, calls for 22 more retail businesses and 189 apartments in the district’s western end, between Parliament and Fishamble streets. The year after that, a new bridge may arch across the Liffey a few blocks west of the Ha’Penny span.

On an island that for generations didn’t even have enough jobs to keep its brightest young people from emigrating, the biggest problem faced by Temple Bar’s keepers these days is how to keep all the free-spending, job-creating foreigners from spoiling the place.

Specifically, many worry that Temple Bar’s raucous night life could obliterate its cultural ambitions. The neighborhood has no topless bars or houses of prostitution, but has garnered a reputation in Europe as a destination for bachelor and bachelorette parties.

Late on Friday and Saturday nights, you see them piling into pedicabs, dancing on tables and pressing life-size inflatable dolls to the window of the Thunder Road Cafe, or staggering pub to pub on Fleet Street in their matching T-shirts or tiaras.

After midnight on many a weekend night, one innkeeper confided, “it’s all young people getting sick. . . . It’s safe and it’s vital. But I wouldn’t recommend it to the middle-aged.”

The Irish call these stag and hen parties. In November, the neighborhood’s leading development agency, Temple Bar Properties, released a public-opinion survey suggesting that continued loutish behavior by the stags and hens (who amount to perhaps 1% of Dublin’s tourists) could chase away as many as 13% of the other, less boisterous, tourists.

In an effort to calm the din, most Temple Bar pubs claim to enforce a minimum drinking age of 23, even though the legal limit is just 18. (Some pubs’ claims are taken more seriously than others.) Also, since 1995 local law enforcement has placed half a dozen outdoor cameras to oversee the area, a move that redevelopment officials say has reduced street crime (larcenies such as pickpocketing, mostly) by 70%. In late 1998, the neighborhood’s publicans pledged new steps to discourage boorish behavior by large groups.

Inevitably, as surveillance cameras are mounted, faux cobblestones are carted in and upscale retailers hang out their shingles, some of the old atmosphere is lost. And just as some New Yorkers profess nostalgia for the honest blight of pre-renovation Times Square, some Dubliners moan that the city core they knew is vanishing.

The most prominent symbol of the new Temple Bar is probably the Clarence Hotel. Once a 19th century customhouse, later a down-at-the-heels lodging at the Liffey’s edge, it was transformed and reopened in 1996 as an ultra-chic hotel and watering hole. The owners include singer Bono and other members of the band U2.

I stayed two nights. Inside, I found wood-paneled interiors of Shaker simplicity; a hushed, clinical lobby area that could pass for a cosmetic surgeon’s waiting room; and room rates starting at about $280 nightly. The fixtures were stylish, my leather armchair was comfortable, the free newspaper and the Gregorian chants on the sound system at breakfast were a nice touch. But the room TV was a meager 13-incher, that armchair was crowded into a tight corner about 10 inches from my bed, and when I asked the desk to add a second local newspaper to my room delivery, they charged me more than $2 extra. The paper’s face value was about 50 cents. It’s no fun to pay $300 and then be nickel-and-dimed.

From the Clarence I moved to the Morgan, a similarly minimalist place (but $100 cheaper each night) on a nightclub-heavy stretch of Fleet Street. But next time, if I didn’t have anyone to impress, I’d lean toward the less fashionable but cheerful and tidy Harding Hotel. It opened in 1996 just off Fishamble Street, and asks just under $100 nightly for a double room with mustard-colored walls and knotty pine furniture.

From such a room, the sounds of a Temple Bar night--chatting crowds and rollicking pubs--have been known to draw visitors onto the street and into a pub, perhaps Byrne’s or Eamonn Doran’s or Fitzsimon’s, Oliver St. John Gogarty’s or the Norseman or Turk’s, or any one of two dozen others. Depending on what kind of bar you’re in, there might be folk songs or dance music, cozy traditional paneling or stark modern design. Depending on the pub’s classification under Ireland’s arcane licensing laws, closing might come at 11:30, 12:30 or 1:30.

One of those with a “late license” is the Foggy Dew, where I found myself one early morning in the middle of a time-honored Irish rite: the ignorin’ o’ the closin’. Outside, the shoes of several hundred recently expelled revelers clattered on the reconditioned cobblestones. Inside, while we drinkers pretended not to notice, the barman flickered the lights. The Dubliners, well practiced at this dance, edged their way into the dark corners farthest from the door. The bouncer, knowing it was futile, charged from room to room hollering.

“We’ve got your money!” he yelled. “Now go home!”

And in our own sweet time, we did.

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GUIDEBOOK

Bar Hopping

Getting there: From LAX to Dublin there’s connecting service only. To use just one carrier, fly Delta, Continental or KLM (other connections involve a change of airline as well as plane). Fares begin at about $560 round trip. Aer Lingus will begin nonstop service from LAX to Dublin May 28.

Where to stay: Clarence Hotel, 6-8 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2; telephone 011-353-1-670-9000, fax 011-353-1-670-7800. High style, higher prices. 48 rooms, many with river views. Rates start at about $300 nightly.

The Morgan, 10 Fleet St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2; tel. 011-353-1-679-3939, fax 011-353-1-679-3946. Minimalist style; sports cafe and bar. Double rooms about $180.

Harding Hotel, Cooper Alley, Fishamble St., Christchurch, Dublin 2.; tel. 011-353-1-679-6500, fax 011-353-1-679-6504. 53 rooms, many overlooking Christchurch Cathedral. Doubles $80-$90.

Kinlay House Christchurch, 2/12 Lord Edwards St., Dublin 2, tel. 011-353-1-679-6644, fax 011-353-1-679-7437. A hostel, about 180 beds in all. Twin rooms about $30 per person, multi-bed rooms $15 nightly.

Where to eat: Eden, Meeting House Square, telephone 011-353-1-670-5372. Contemporary Irish. Main courses $16-$26. Mermaid Cafe, 69/70 Dame St., tel. 011-353-1-670-8236. Contemporary Irish. Main courses $16-$26. Bruno’s, 30 E. Essex St., tel. 011-353-1-670-6767. Italian and French Mediterranean. Main courses $15-$22.

For more information: Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10154; tel. (800) 223-6470 or (212) 418-0800, fax (800) 371-9052, Internet https://www.ireland.travel.ie. Temple Bar Information Centre, 18 Eustace St., Dublin 2; tel. 011-353-1-671-5717, fax 011-353-1-677-2525, Internet https://www.temple-bar.ie.