Dublin City Council is planning to create a new "cathedral quarter" in the heart of the medieval city, centred on Christ Church and St Patrick's and surviving remnants of the old city walls.
The plan envisages creating new routes through the area, following the line of the walls where possible, as well as new public spaces and a city museum on St John's Lane, partially obscuring the north front of Christ Church Cathedral.
Other proposals in the plan, which was drawn up by McCullough Mulvin Architects, include eliminating St Audoen's Park on the corner of High Street and Bridge Street to reinstate a sense of enclosure by building up the street frontages.
The sunken Peace Garden at the corner of Christchurch Place and Nicholas Street - installed in 1991 - is also being targeted for similar treatment, though an element of green space would be retained behind a new building on the frontage.
Implementation of the plan, which has the support of city archaeologist Ruth Johnson and heritage officer Donncha Ó Dulaing, will start with the creation of a new public space in front of the longest intact section of the city wall in Great Ship Street.
Architect Niall McCullough said the aim would be to provide a new route linking Dublin Castle with Nicholas Street following the line of the city wall, including the little-known Geneval's Tower, off Bride Road, which is currently inaccessible to the public.
The Office of Public Works and Dublin City Council have agreed to a series of land swaps to facilitate the plan, according to the city council's chief planning officer, Dick Gleeson, who said the aim was to "reinterpret the history and meaning of the city walls".
He conceded that the historic core of Dublin had become "extremely fragmented", largely due to the damage caused by major road-widening schemes that turned High Street/Cornmarket and much of Nicholas Street/Patrick Street into dual-carriageways.
"The cathedral quarter plan makes a big strong gesture towards repairing the damage done to the city core," Mr Gleeson said. "It will also create multiple routes from St Stephen's Green and Trinity College to bring more tourists into the Liberties." At present, many tourists "get lost and confused in the city core, suffering a huge amount of angst crossing roads" in what Ms Johnson described as a "noisy, dirty, unfriendly pedestrian environment". What they should be getting is a "real experience".
Under the plan, some road space will be "reclaimed" to make more room for pedestrians. "Cornmarket is so blown apart that we have to be very bold looking at the options to reinstate it while creating a new public amenity for local people," Mr Gleeson said.
According to Mr McCullough, the whole area needed the urban design equivalent of "mouth-to-mouth resuscitation". The creation of new pedestrian routes would provide a "different way of going round the city that nobody has used for hundreds of years".
He stressed that the plan aimed to "keep every fragment" of the city wall because the urban grain of the area is based on it. "We're at the point in Dublin where you have to hang on to things like that ferociously, because there isn't much of it left". Asked about the potentially contentious proposal to build a city museum in front of Christ Church Cathedral, he said medieval cathedrals "should be seen over roofs", rather than being exposed. "These roofs were there until 40 or 50 years ago," he added.
Mr Gleeson said Dublin badly needed a city museum that would "fill out" the site of the Civic Offices.
