The logo is bright, charming and childishly simple. A small hand reaching up to the sun; five little fingers representing five neighbourhoods, reaching towards a bright, new future, symbol of a dream for a new town, new life, new hope, for some 20,000 citizens, condemned 30 years ago to a high-rise, windswept wasteland on a road to nowhere.

Backing the dream is some £180 million of taxpayers' money and Ballymun Regeneration, the company set up and owned by Dublin Corporation which aims to make the dream a reality.

Centre stage, though some might dispute that, are the Ballymun-ers themselves.

Any group of people offered the holy trinity of exciting, high-quality housing linked to economic and social renewal would be delighted, you might think. Many of them are.

But they are also apprehensive, wary, sceptical, deeply suspicious and downright hostile in varying degrees . . . in short, the reaction to be anticipated from any community faced with the demolition of all it has known, where a skeletal map is all they can see of the future, and all of it in the hands of people they haven't yet learned to trust.

The problem is that there is nothing this community hasn't heard before.

"I've learned to disbelieve on principle everything a corporation spokesman says," says Peadar Kelly, a flat-dweller and editor of Ballymun News for 25 years. "Very seldom is the full truth in everything they say. This plan is a triumph of hope over proven form."

"It's fair to say that everybody is extremely cautious. We've been so let down. They're really concerned that the mistakes of the past will be repeated," says Ballymun-reared Anne Keating.

"More than 30 years ago, when my mother moved into Ballymun, she was told she was going to live in this new model town, the showpiece of Europe. It took us 10 years and more to get facilities that were in the original plans, things like the pool and the library. And we had to fight like hell for them even then. . ."

So if the past is a country of desperate neglect, catastrophic social policy, paternalistic attitudes, mutual distrust and broken promises, why should the future be any different?

And yet. . .

This time round, Anne Keating is at the centre of the action. She is on the board of BRL, even if it required a sharp nudge in other ribs to get her there.

Though operative since October, the board was bereft of either flat-dwellers or women before she and Pat Kelly (wife of Peadar) sat down to their first board meeting this week.

It's the kind of omission that fuels influential sceptics such as Kathleen Maher, manager of the Women's Resource Centre, a prime mover behind Woman in Local Development (WILD) and a woman unwilling to be appeased: "I'm disappointed that women, who built this community, weren't involved at that level before now, when the planning was going on. Now it's too little, too late," she says conclusively.

But later it emerges that her anger about BRL's consultative model is only part of the problem. Her real distress is about the proposed demolition of the tower blocks, a thought that fills her with "great sadness".

"At one level, I'm saying yes to the regeneration because I know that the towers are losing lumps of concrete and we might see one collapse. But then there's a part of me at the core that wants to refuse that regeneration. It's inevitable that our community spirit will go."

Some worry about the plan to create five "communities" (though the planners call them neighbourhoods), believing it will create competition between them, divide them and dilute their strength.

There are even some who dispute that the tower blocks are structurally unsound at all (a reason given for their demolition). "The flats were described as `inherently robust' in the engineering report that went with the refurbishment evaluation," says Peadar Kelly.

This is echoed by French-born, former security guard turned composer, Robert Guillemot, who has lived in the flats for nearly 20 years. (The flats have also housed Belgian, Italian and Chinese tenants).

His concerns include the inevitable loss of green space to building (new homes will occupy about half the green space) and the security of the £180 million fund should EMU crash, for example.

Anne Keating understands the scepticism about political commitment.

"The people are worried of course that this will be only half done and they'll be left as the neighbours from hell for another 30 years." John Fitzpatrick of the Ballymun Task Force and BRL board member agrees: "I'd sleep better at night if I felt the money was locked in a safe somewhere the Government couldn't get at it."

Dissidents are not confined to Ballymun either. Down on the Glasnevin side of what one wag referred to as the "cordon sanitaire" of the 65-acre Poppintree Park, tempers are fraying at the prospect of Ballymun moving closer, when some of the proposed 90 new houses on the park fringe will sit back to back with some on the Glasnevin side.

The designers' contention that houses fronting on the park, currently a vast, featureless host to all sorts of nefarious activities, according to locals, also provide security for that area, cuts no ice with Vincent Regazzoli of the Willow-Cedar Action Group on the Glasnevin side.

No houses please; he wants a pitch-and-putt course, a playground and an ornamental garden as well as park security.

But as the £180 million is designated for demolition and rehousing only, one way BRL hopes to finance plans to upgrade the park's remaining 42 acres and move ugly high tension cabling underground is by selling park ground for private housing. Mr Regazzoli will fight them all the way to the European courts.

His neighbour, Tony Higgins, chairman of the Cedarwood Residents Association, is delighted with the plan, however. "We can't understand where that action group is coming from. From our point of view, the eyesore will be gone and trespassing will be much more controllable."

These conflicting views typify the challenges in Ballymun's rebirth. Births are usually preceded by a loud, messy, painful labour and this will be no different. Ballymun's, though, will shudder along for eight years at least, during which residents will be picking their way through a colossal building site, towards an end product that to many people still seems "very vague".

Then again, as one robust resident put it, "Ballymun seems to have grown a lot of negative thinkers. . ."

Meanwhile, at BRL's Stormanstown House headquarters in Ballymun, the core staff of 14 has worked into the early hours in recent weeks to prepare for this weekend's draft master plan exhibition.

It's an open house and from the receptionist up, their willingness to engage is evident.

Energetic, alert and friendly, the architects and planners drop in to the communal kitchen for coffee and chat freely to all-comers. They're attuned to it by now; Ballymun is bursting with 190 groups, clubs and associations.

Spearheaded by seconded corporation officials, Ciaran Murray, managing director of BRL, and Eamon Farrelly, projects and contracts liaison manager, the company seems to be in a perpetual state of consultation. Even while locals insist that huge numbers of residents remain ignorant of what BRL stands for, records show a series of at least 30 public meetings as well as nearly 50 special interest meetings since November.

Eamon Farrelly meets everyone who turns up at HQ every day at the open house. Ciaran Murray has an average of seven meetings a day. There is a monthly newsletter. The message pumped out is that this not just housing regeneration, which in itself would be useless; hand in hand with that is a brief to bring economic and social regeneration.

"That is exciting, trying to improve economic opportunities," says the chief architect, David Pritchard, "and that's what this project can do."

They now talk of Ballymun, once an estate on the edge, as one of the most strategically located areas in the country, next to the airport, within four miles of O'Connell Street, connected to the M50 and ideally suited for a business park.

With the help of their proposed tax designation status, they are, says Ciaran Murray, "pro-actively promoting Ballymun as a place of business and already have tons of interest". Though he remained tight-lipped about what kind, the names of Sainsbury and Compaq, the technology company, have emerged in dispatches.

The National College of Industrial Relations, a college with a particular affinity with the disadvantaged, has confirmed to The Irish Times its proposal to establish a centre for educational access and opportunity in the new town. Developers have also shown interest in plans for a 10-14 storey hotel at the entrance to the park, "a tall beacon of sorts which will announce that `this is the new Ballymun' ".

David Pritchard makes no apology for building on green space. "There is too much space and no sense of place in Ballymun. It's quantity not quality. What this plan will be giving is a greater sense of enclosure. At the moment, it feels more like a dual carriageway. . ." The roundabout will go, to be replaced by a calm, treelined "main street".

A huge effort will be made to improve the social mix by for example, attracting students from DCU into apartments above shops and offices.

They talk of properly landscaped parks, greens, playgrounds and pitches and neighbourhood centres with shops, meeting rooms and good community facilities for each of the five neighbourhoods.

Mr Pritchard seems almost intrigued by the notion that Sisk, the owner of the existing shopping centre, doesn't care for BRL's plans.

"We find that odd because the existing shopping centre blights the image of Ballymun. It's not necessarily their fault. But as you drive down, you can't tell which shops are open or even which shops exist. You can't even see readily where to park, so obviously, there will be no passing trade".

As for the big picture, "one fears big solutions to big problems lest you replace one disaster with another", he says.

What the planners are aiming for is not one big solution but "to provide a framework for a multiplicity of small solutions".

The draft master plan indicates elements that must soon be fixed, land uses, road system, location and character of open space, but after that, anything is possible. There could be 20 or more designers involved in designing houses over the eight year period for instance.

The first of Ballymun's seven towers is scheduled for demolition on January 1st, 2000, a symbolic date for closure and renewal.

What the people of Ballymun really want to know is whether, this time, the political will is there to see them safely through.