IN ONE respect, 1988 was a very good year for public art in Dublin: heaps of it was made. In most respects, however, it was a gloomy time. It was, after all, the year that saw some of the country's most embarrassing works of sculpture installed in prominent sites around the capital, celebrating the city's millennium with the creation of an enduring legacy of embarrassment.

That year saw the advent of Eamon O'Doherty's Anna Livia in O'Connell Street, a stretched fountain in granite presided over by a reclining figure resembling an extra-terrestrial from a hippy sci-fi movie. The same year saw Meeting Place, Jakki McKenna's bronze sculpture of two women in civvies on Liffey Street. The piece may have been created "in recognition and celebration of women" but it seems to demonstrate the odd inarticulacy of a certain type of self-consciously popular" representational sculpture.

There were plenty more, just as bad. Take (and, as Les Dawson might have said, please, please, take) Molly Malone, the proto Wonderbra-ed bronze by Jeanne Rynhart, which offers a ludicrously gauche dash of eroticism to the Trinity College end of Grafton Street.

It is perhaps true that public art has seldom touched the depths it did in the Dublin millennium period, and public funding and open competition have failed to produce much to rival Molly or Anna for audacious kitsch. Many far more successful works have appeared around the city since the period of millennial madness.

Dublin Castle hosts a large number of specially made works of a high standard, while commissioning around Temple Bar, such as Maud Cotter's and Remco de Fouw's doors for the Green Building, has occasionally led to fascinating work. Nevertheless, there is still no way of ensuring that the terrors of 1988 will not come again.

There is good money available for public art, or art in the public environment as it sometimes prefers to be known. The Department of Environment allows local authorities funding for he provision of artistic features for public works under the "Percent for Art Scheme. The maximum funding available under the scheme is one per cent of the construction of the total project costs, up to £20,000.

The Office of Public Works and the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaelteacht run similar schemes.

A review of the existing schemes, the Public Art Research Project jointly commissioned by the Departments of the Environment and of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht plans to map out a future for art in the public environment. It is a striking paradox that a completed, hugely significant report on the future of public art in Ireland has not been made public.

Although the report was completed early last year, it is still moving through that traditional administrative dark side of the moon between drafting and publication. One observer of the process suggests this is because various Government departments are reticent about being obliged to make the effort to commission and administer public art projects for their sites. The Percent for Art Scheme is not, at present, obligatory, but some suggest that the report may make it so.

THE ill effects of this delay are obvious when you consider that the Dublin Transport Initiative, which may see £200,000 worth of commissions and will have a major impact on public art in the capital, has agreed to abide by the recommendations of the unpublished report.

The organisation co-ordinating the initiative has only had sight of the report "on an unofficial basis".

When and if the report comes into the light, what effects can we, or indeed should we, expect it to have? While the report will certainly deal with questions of funding, there are wider issues concerning the nature of art in the public environment which must also be addressed.

The institution this year of the Nissan Award, and of the Sculpture Society of Ireland's "Ireland and Europe" event for later this year, as well as events such as the Achill Island Sculpture Symposium last year, and indeed, smaller scale projects like those which emerge from groups such as Critical Access, point to an important shift in the definition of public art.

All these events seek to promote temporary art and to encourage a move away from constructions which might become permanent monuments, towards works which attempt to reconfigure the environment for only a limited amount of time. This type of work is not, of course, unique to Ireland. In the US, events such as the 1991 Places with a Past event in South Carolina, where artists were sent out to find non-traditional spaces in which to create, temporary site-specific installations, led the way for new modes of public art. In Britain, some of the most notable public art works in recent times have been produced by organisations such as Artangel, geared to making temporary artist-led interventions.

Any new plan for public art in Ireland must be careful to avoid reinforcing one conception of public art as something which is weatherproof above all - that has long ago been tried and found wanting elsewhere. Some more radical artists might see the imposition of any art on the public as an unwarranted State intrusion, but if artists do not address public spaces, those spaces will be left, as they are now, largely in the control of the commercial concerns which advertise on buses, bus shelters and billboards.

WHATEVER the final report turns out to advocate, it is essential not to miss one opportunity,a mechanism, must be created for correcting previous mistakes. The greatest gift to the environment of the capital would be the opportunity to start again on crucial sites which currently offer an image of Ireland as a place in which public art is carried out in the visual language of the lowest common denominator.

Let's admit our mistakes and rectify them with a bulldozer. Let us begin by closing down Molly Malone's Grafton Street stall and calling the end of bath time for Anna Livia. As far as public art is concerned, something is not always better than nothing.