The library is one of the last free spaces left where people can stop, relax and reflect. Louise East spends a day at Blanchardstown Library and celebrates an enduring tradition.

Twenty small girls are enthusiastically pushing pink carnations into little tubs of green Oasis foam. "Have you all finished putting in your foliage?" asks a grey-haired woman. Most of them nod, except for one who asks: "What's foliage again?" "It's all the green stuff," says the children's librarian, who is moving around the room, handing out more carnations.

Whoa, back up a little there. Children's librarian handing out carnations? Surely some mistake: librarians are scary creatures in hand-knitted cardigans who say shush a lot and turn children who haven't paid their library fines into mice. They're not flower-wielding, skate-pants-wearing women in their 20s.

But then the building we're in looks nothing like the public library of old, and the people in it are nothing like the musty old men who used to eat currant buns furtively in corners of my old local library. For a start, these library users are every colour under the sun, they're not talking in whispers and they're arranging flowers rather than reading books. This is Blanchardstown Library.

At nine months old, it's the darling newborn of the State's public-library system, held aloft as the strappingly healthy model for the next generation of public libraries. Which makes the 1,500-plus people who pour through the doors each day the next generation of library users. So who are they and what are they using their library for?

When the doors open, at 10 a.m., there's already a small, polite queue of people waiting. Five men settle into chairs around a low table, flooded with light from the vast front window, and take out textbooks and English dictionaries. From Sudan but living in Clonsilla, they've bagged this spot every day for the past couple of weeks, in the run-up to their Irish Medical Council exams. "The library's good for all activities," says Elsawi Osman. "If you want a quiet place to study you can do that, or else you can meet to study and discuss, like us."

Across the foyer, John Crowley is making his way through the day's papers, concentrating on the sports sections. Why is he doing his reading here and not at home? "What's a library for? I find if very relaxing here; you can read in comfort." Come hail or shine, he visits the library every morning, usually spending a couple of hours here. "Mind you, my sight isn't as good as it used to be," he says, a little mournfully.

By 10.30 a.m., there is a most unlibrary-like hubbub in the junior library. "Who needs more legs?" asks Lynda Beasley, the unscary children's librarian. While James Doyle (two and a half) and Blánaid Rock (two) get on with the vital task of attaching sparkly pipe-cleaners to a leery-looking spider, Paula Doyle and Carol Rock agree that the mother-and-toddler group is a very welcome addition to the area.

"There's plenty of stuff for older kids, but not for this age group, who aren't at playschool yet," says Doyle. "It's great for the kids to mix with other kids," says Rock. "And great for their mammies to get out of the house and not go mad," grins Doyle. James points out, twice, that he's a boy and says he likes the toys. Oh, and the books.

"It's a labour of love," says Richie Farrell, project librarian for Fingal, who has been working on Blanchardstown since it was a greenfield site, in 1997. "We've totally changed the structure of a library. It's much more a community space."

He and the three senior librarians - Evelyn Conway, Bernadette Fennell and Dermot Bregazzi - speak with the enthusiasm of library veterans who have finally been allowed to expel the bugbears that have been annoying them for years.

"We were given a space, a blank canvas," says Farrell. "Then it was up to us to find out what people wanted from their library." As far back as 1997, the resounding answer was that they wanted information technology. "People were asking us: 'When will you have the Internet? Why can't we have it already?' "

So into the Blanchardstown melting pot were placed 64 personal computers, all with Internet access and free to use. Community groups or partnership schemes can book a cyberskills room, for training courses. And a beginners' course run by the library garnered huge interest, says Conway, from "non-nationals, be they asylum-seekers, students or refugees, stay-at-home mums and the elderly, who might have an interest but neither the skills nor the means to do a more structured course".

In addition, there are CD-ROMs, CDs, videos, art prints and a vast mezzanine-level reference section, which has shelves of periodicals from Hogan's Stand to Homes & Gardens, reference books from Thom's Directory to Teach Yourself Spanish, brand new encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps, copies of The Irish Times on microfilm going back to 1859 and a temporary World Cup 2002 display that optimistically offers a guide to Japanese architecture beside a map of Yokohama.

At one of the daisy-like clumps of PCs, a smart blonde woman is scrolling through the Monster Jobs website; three teenagers are huddled around one screen, painstakingly typing up a CV with one finger; and a boy is writing a letter in an Asian script. At another clump, all six users are logged onto websites of a different language, including an online casino in Italian and a Scandinavian chat room.

Blanchardstown's users come from all corners of the globe - and also from a surprisingly large area of Ireland. Although the official catchment area is a two-and-a-half mile radius, with a population of 80,000-100,000, people come from counties Meath, Louth, Cavan and Monaghan.

"It was a very deliberate strategy, placing it right next to the most successful shopping centre in the country," says Farrell. "Often, people who come to the Blanchardstown Centre or work there pop in and exchange their books after they've done their shopping."

Ah yes, books. It's quite a shock to hear somebody mention those old paper things but, once you look up from the bright computer screens, there are plenty of people ambling up and down the aisles, their heads tilted to one side in the traditional library position.

A young girl in a white tracksuit and denim jacket is engrossed in a plumbing manual; an elderly gentleman consults a map of South-East Asia; and a woman trots back and forth from her mother, who is sitting next to the long shelf of fiction.

"Can you see Marian Keyes at all?" she asks in a whisper. Pauline O'Neill confesses that she isn't a great reader, but her son comes here regularly "off his own bat" and her mother, Una Callaghan, devours books whole, especially anything by Irish writers: Keyes, Maeve Binchy, Cathy Kelly. "It's great, but it's so big that it can be a bit difficult to find things."

Upstairs, the study carrels are filling up with students from some of the 25 schools and third-level institutions in the area. A teenager flicks through a copy of Less Stress More Success and absent-mindedly drinks a bottle of Lucozade. Several more are furiously engaged in the Leaving Cert equivalent of a decade of the rosary, underlining things, and one man has taken off his shoes and fallen asleep with his head on a dictionary.

Ruth Kennedy takes a break from study to check her Hotmail account. She's doing a veterinary PhD at University College Dublin but likes to study here rather than battle the traffic across town from her home, in Kildare.

Another UCD student, Gaye Osborne, is studying for an adult-education diploma in genealogy in the evenings. Blanchardstown is convenient for her and has some of the books she needs, but she says: "I wouldn't really call it quiet".

IT'S certainly not quiet in the lecture room, but then it's soundproofed, so it doesn't really matter. With space for 80 to 100 people, the room is used by all sorts of community groups, from the North Eastern Health Board to a local unemployed men's group, as well as any number of groups organised by the library.

Irish classes, run by Charlie Quinn, an enthusiastic gaelgóir member of staff, in conjunction with Foras na Gaeilge proved so popular that a second class had to be scheduled. Today it's the turn of the local gaelscoil, Scoil Oilibhéir, whose students are being taught to make Bridgid's Crosses and learning the story of St Bridgid herself. The noise dies down, broken only by the odd exclamation of "Is mise lost". The same air of quiet concentration marks the hugely popular flower- arranging class, later in the day. But really, flower arranging? Cross making? Isn't a library meant to be about books? "We are a cultural institution and we have a responsibility to the written word," says Farrell. "But in order to encourage people to read we have to bring them in."

Beasley, who as children's librarian is at the front line in the war to win children over to the library, and away from all the other distractions available, points out: "There is this attitude that libraries are boring and you have to be quiet there." The battle gets even fiercer when you're trying to win the attention of kids whose parents are unlikely to use libraries. "It's good to be associated with more than just books - as somewhere you can have fun."

Lessons have been learned from the patch in the mid-1980s when library attendance slumped to an all-time low. "There was no national commitment to the library system," says Farrell. "Funds weren't being put into the libraries and we weren't offering what people wanted." An improvement in local government in the early 1990s, and the 1994 split that resulted in the creation of the Fingal County Council, have given new life to the library system, and figures have risen steadily since.

A day at Blanchardstown Library more than makes a case for the public library. Here are the people who have nowhere else to go, people who would go demented sitting at home, people who have a thirst for knowledge and a dearth of funds to satisfy it, people with an inquiry no bookshop could deal with and people relieved, finally, to find a space where they are no longer refugees but library users.

At the end of one aisle sit two women, side by side, one a teenager, engrossed in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, the other working her way through a stack of books on breast cancer. Blanchardstown Library - way to go.