Planning permission is being sought from Dublin Corporation for a £100 million shopping and leisure centre on the west side of O'Connell Street which would provide a much-needed anchor for its renaissance.

The scheme incorporates the former Carlton cinema, creating a full-height Continental-style galleria behind its art deco-style facade which will extend for 330 feet westwards to Moore Street, ending directly opposite the ILAC shopping centre.

Flanking the listed Carlton facade would be a pair of new buildings designed in a "contemporary art deco style". One of these would be built on the derelict site between the Carlton and Fingal County Council's office block, which is to be turned into a 61bedroom hotel. The entire street facade would be 2.5 times the length of Clery's department store, according to Mr Paul Clinton, the architect and project manager who designed the scheme - billed as the "Millennium Mall" - in collaboration with Arthur Gibney and Partners. The Carlton Group, headed by Mr Richard Quirke, who runs the "Dr Quirkey's Leisure Emporium" adjoining the former cinema, already has full planning permission to develop part of the site as a national conference centre, but this scheme has now been abandoned.

The group decided not to enter the latest Bord Failte competition for the conference centre, fearing that it would also end in a fiasco. Instead, it concentrated on assembling an even larger site of three acres - O'Connell Street and Moore Street - "without anyone knowing what we were at", Mr Clinton told The Irish Times. "It was all done using different firms of solicitors, estate agents and banks."

However, once this "fairly well-kept secret" became known in recent weeks, the Carlton Group has had a number of approaches from other developers who also see the potential of the scheme to create a retail "magnet" to rival Grafton Street on the southside.

"You could call it the revenge of the northside", Mr Clinton said. "At 500,000 square feet, it will be even bigger than the Jervis Centre - and that's not counting the 15 auditoriums we are proposing on the upper levels or the 750-space underground car park." The auditoriums, including two large ones, would be multi-purpose facilities and could be used for conferences. However, the likelihood is that they would become a multiplex cinema; UCI International has already expressed an interest in running the venue.

Apart from a large department store, there would be numerous "niche" shop units and "themed" bars and restaurants. "We are trying to produce a complex that will become a `destination', encouraging more people to come into town in the evenings", Mr Clinton said.

The design of the mall linking O'Connell Street with Moore Street was "inspired by the classical arcades and galleries found in European cities such as Paris, Milan and Moscow", he explained. "We see it as being a major new civic space and pedestrian precinct."

The Carlton Group's scheme is also inspired by Whitely's of Bayswater, in London. Once a department store, its elaborate stone facade dating from the 1920s now cloaks a shopping and leisure centre which has given the area a more "upmarket" tag. The galleria, over four storeys high, would be "cranked" so that it would end up on Moore Street directly opposite the entrance to the ILAC centre, which is to be renovated by Irish Life. "Our scheme will be a major godsend for ILAC," according to Mr Clinton.

"Not only will it get rid of the idea of Moore Street being a `dead-end', by linking it directly with Upper O'Connell Street, but it also offers the prospect of Moore Street becoming Dublin's version of Covent Garden, with restaurants on both sides of the street," he said.

Establishing such a link between O'Connell Street and Moore Street is one of the key elements of Dublin Corporation's recentlypublished plan for the renaissance of the capital's main thoroughfare. This widely-welcomed plan has also impressed retail interests.

For years, the west side of O'Connell Street has lacked an obvious "anchor" to match the Gresham Hotel and Savoy cinema complex on the opposite side of the street. The scheme now proposed by the Carlton Group might be just the ticket to raise it up in the world.