Two years ago, in an Irish Times supplement on cities, I argued that we Irish are not really an urban people - a thesis that was challenged at the time by architect Sean O Laoire. He wrote that any visitor to Dublin "would be struck immediately by the intensity of activity right through the urban core" after 11 p.m., with all the "late-night liggers, nightclub goers, strollers, revellers, down-and-outs, policemen, ambulances in one vast urban drawingroom".
Mr O Laoire suggested that Eamon de Valera would probably turn in his grave at "the new urban bourgeoisie debating the merits of extra virgin olive oil or sun-dried tomatoes" and talking knowledgeably about fine wines - all marks, one must suppose, of a sophisticated urban culture. He also quoted a visiting Dutch critic who detected here seeds of the architectural talent which had made Barcelona a real Mecca for people seeking an "urban experience".
Dublin's urban culture is still half-formed, however. Architects designing new buildings in Temple Bar, for example, never anticipated that the alcoves they were creating at street level would inevitably be used as informal toilets by revellers relieving themselves after drinking too many pints. Such public urination is not generally encountered in Barcelona or any other continental city, but it has become an endemic feature of Dublin's beer-swilling nightlife.
In 1932, to coincide with the Eucharistic Congress, the authorities installed a series of quite elegant cast-iron pissoirs along the Liffey Quays to cater for the multitudes of men who might be short-taken on their way to Mass in the Phoenix Park. The last of them, at Capel Street bridge, was removed about 20 years ago. But perhaps Dublin Corporation might consider bringing them back, to provide much-needed facilities for incontinent revellers.
The city's half-formed urban culture manifests itself in other ways, too. In Temple Bar Square, three stone benches were taken away earlier this year because they had become a base for drug dealers and New Age travellers with mangey dogs. They were replaced by five lime trees, planted without any protection. Within weeks, one had been snapped in two by vandals. Another died because someone dumped a pile of rubbish around it and someone else then set fire to the rubbish.
Meeting House Square, one of the great achievements of the Temple Bar project, must be gated at night-time because of fears that it would be trashed if left open. This effective privatisation of a major public space is unfortunate. But there is simply too much plate glass for Temple Bar Properties to take the risk of leaving the square open to all and sundry in the wee small hours; other cultural institutions in the area have already had to replace broken windows. In 1988, as part of the Millennium celebrations, the city acquired several new public sculptures, all with memorable nicknames. But "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi" is regularly drained of water because it is used as an unofficial dump by fast-food consumers. And the first thing that happened to "The Hags with the Bags" in Lower Liffey Street was that they had their bags nicked; new bronze shopping bags, screwed into the ground, were sponsored by Arnotts.
FRANCES Hegarty and Andrew Stones, who devised the winning Nissan Art Project, also had to contend with casual vandalism. Their most exposed pink neon strips of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, on the quay wall at the Ha'penny Bridge, became a target for stone-throwing and had to be covered by wire mesh to protect the fragile quotations. "O that awful deepdown torrent O and . . ." survives intact, but two letters went missing from ". . . the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire."
It's a mercy that most of the aptly-chosen lines from Ulysses are placed at sufficiently high levels to escape such depredations - below the parapet of the Clarence Hotel ("suppose our rooms at the hotel were beside each other and any fooling went on") or in the pediment of City Hall ("itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it") or behind the Nassau Street railings of Trinity College ("I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning").
Luke Clancy's rather jaundiced review of the project, which dismissed it as another manifestation of the "Joyce industry", was quite unfair to the artists involved. He must surely realise that cities need to celebrate their strengths and it is a fact, as Nuala O'Faolain once pointed out, that the most famous book about any city in the world was written not about London or New York or Tokyo, but about dear old dirty Dublin, our very own Hibernian metropolis.
Barcelona knows how to celebrate. Ten years ago, when its brilliant mayor, Pasqual Maragall, was trying to clean up the Ramblas, the city's somewhat seedy main street was lined with colourful pennants, each one emblazoned with the slogan "Si! Si! La Rambla. Si!". One suspects that if Dublin Corporation made a really serious attempt to reinvent O'Connell Street, our homegrown gurriers would be climbing up the poles to tear down any symbols of civic celebration. While some effort has been made to steamclean chewing gum residues off the footpaths of "Ireland's main street", the essential dirtiness of Dublin is still one of its most striking features - especially if you're returning from somewhere in Europe, with the possible exception of Athens. The footpaths become filthy in dry periods because we appear to rely on regular rain to wash them. And has anyone noticed the organic juice which oozes out of the base of every litter bin?
Street furniture is poorly designed. Most of the railings used to restrain pedestrians from jaywalking seem to be inspired by sheep pens, while the on-street facilities provided for bicycle parking are silly pieces of mock-Victoriana, so utterly impractical and wasteful of space that they must have been dreamed up by a motorist. The streetscapes of Dublin, even the great architectural set-piece of College Green, are also marred by a plethora of signs and clutter.
Meanwhile, the Parks Department remains wedded to flowerbeds and "pocket parks", installed without any regard for their context. And when it comes to paving, have a look at what happened at the junction of Temple Bar's Curved Street and Eustace Street, where the architects provided a perfectly curved drainage channel in preformed limestone - and the city authorities carried it over the granite footpath, quite askew, with the crude assistance of an angle-grinder.
This lack of civic pride also shows itself in the piles of rubbish left out on footpaths every day, sometimes for hours on end, by the city's shopkeepers. I could go on and on, but the point is made: we may think of Dublin as the "new Barcelona", and we may well know all about extra virgin olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, but we've got a long way to go before we can claim to have a true urban culture.