I SEE where our readers have been reminded that entries for the Public Libraries Essay Competition close next Tuesday, February 4th.

Launching the competition last December, Declan Kiberd ventured the opinion - oh all right, he said, that "libraries continue to offer one of the few remaining civic spaces in which people feel absolutely safe."

I'm not sure about this. The chronic overdue book offender must suffer some nervousness on library precincts. There is always the worry about what action even the most sedate librarian might take. Appearances can be deceptive.

It is also well known that the reclusive American author J.D. Salinger regularly visits public libraries to dig up and destroy whatever material he finds written about him. So I have the recurrent nightmare of turning a corner in my local library in Terenure and bumping into Jerome, on a surreptitious trip from Connecticut, furiously ripping out pages of literary criticism or destroying Ian Hamilton's semi aborted semi biography (In Search of J.D. Salinger).

Yes, or even checking the DIY (glazing) section to root out all reference to the glass family. I wouldn't put it past him.

So much for safety. Declan Kiberd also says that because libraries are accepted as neutral social spaces, they are suitable locations in which to debate matters of public controversy.

I am not sure about this either.

Some very big public controversies of late have involved very big public libraries.

The move of the British Library to its new building at St Pancras has been described as one of the great British civil service bungles of the post war years, and certainly the project has been a huge financial disaster.

When its first books were delivered over five years ago, they fell off the shelves the instant the mobile stacks were moved. It took another; five years to redesign the stacks and sort out innumerable other defects' in structure, wiring and insulation.

Built at a final cost of £511 million, the library was £100 million over budget, and a decade overdue.

As for its appearance, Prince, Charles (predictably enough) compared the building to a secret police academy. I myself think it looks more like a stranded aircraft carrier.

But I am more interested in the aesthetic, moral and symbolic associations of libraries. The British Library has always been homeless, or at any rate has never had its own home, being housed in the British, Museum until the move to St, Pancras. Yet the Reading Room of the British Museum must be one of the best loved places in London. It cannot then be entirely coincidental that it has become a haven for so many of the displaced, the homeless, and for (British) museum pieces, i.e. the very elderly.

Meanwhile, France's new national library was inaugurated in Paris just before Christmas. This building is a monument not to learning, nor to the pitiful number of readers left in France, but to the personage behind it, namely the ludicrously overpraised Francois Mitterrand.

The "TGB" (Tris Grande Bibliotheque), as it has become mockingly known, is yet another reminder of the late French president's bloated ego. It is enormous 20 storeys and 80 metres high. It will apparently cost £1 billion before it is completed in 1988. Annual running costs are estimated at £115 million, with a staff of 250.

I have not yet seen the TGB, but I understand it is even more hideous than the new British embassy on Dublin's Merrion Road. Certainly, public disgust with the building in Paris is even greater than with Mitterrand's other grand follies, the glass pyramid at the Louvre and the new opera house at the Bastille.

So. Feel safe in a library? Well, reasonably so in Terenure (despite the Salinger spectre), in Rathmines, in the ILAC Centre and within the serene cloisters of Kildare Street. But in the new British Library or the TGB? I am afraid not. I cannot imagine trying to settle down and read inside grotesque buildings at which so much hate and outrage have been directed, nor on which so much public money has been misspent.

And accept these libraries as neutral social spaces? No. I would not care to attend debates in buildings which clearly reflect so little care for books or learning or a reading public, and none at all for the poor souls who seek refuge of one kind or another there.