The public debate about tree-felling in O'Connell Street has been characterised by emotion, hysteria and rank political opportunism. It is also infected by amnesia, as the 1998 Integrated Area Plan to regenerate Dublin's main thoroughfare clearly indicated that the existing trees, none of them more than a century old, would be replaced by new trees in a different formation to achieve a "boulevard" effect mimicking the Champs-Elysées in Paris - as was loudly trumpeted at the time.
Whatever one thinks about the appropriateness of importing Continental ideas on urban design, the fact is that the plan envisaged that the greenery on O'Connell Street would be radically different to the present arrangement.
Any close reading of the drawings would have confirmed that this is what the planners had in mind; their only fault was that the text was not explicit in stating that all of the existing London Planes would ultimately be felled.
Nobody objected at the time. In typically Irish fashion, objections have only been voiced now, four years later, at the planning equivalent of two minutes to midnight. These very belated bleatings have also served to distract attention from the principal objective of the 1998 plan, which was - and is - to rescue O'Connell Street from the tawdriness that has tarnished it over the past quarter of a century. This involves addressing three key elements - buildings, street-level uses and the public domain.
It was also in the context of redefining, indeed recharging, the street that an international design competition was held to find a suitable replacement for Nelson's Pillar. The winning scheme, a 120-metre stainless steel structure now officially named "The Spire of Dublin", will finally be erected in the coming weeks after being mired in an equally emotive controversy - partly sparked by our inability to visualise something new until it is standing in front of us.
No self-respecting city would be without its trees. However, as in so many other areas, there are horses for courses.
Thoughtless tree-planting in College Green, purely for the sake of it, has created a large clump of darkness at night, obscuring the floodlit facade of Trinity College, which ought to be visible from the upper reaches of Dame Street.
Even on O'Connell Street itself, it was impossible until recently to see the GPO in its entirety from the opposite side of the street because of the trees that stood in front of it. The Parnell Monument cannot be seen from the GPO for the same reason. Now, the trees on Upper O'Connell Street are to be "reprieved", due to the efforts of councillors clambering over each other to save them.
Dublin would be better served if these myopic politicians learned a sense of perspective and focused instead on the real prize.