When I was a student, the regeneration of Temple Bar in Dublin was held up as a model of How To, but with the more recent delivery of “Helicopter Money” from Brussels to bail out the Irish economy, it became a model of How Not To. On visiting Dublin in 2014, everything seemed a bit too expensive, there were many empty shops and on the outskirts stood miles of unsold houses.
All the investment bank head offices along the Liffey were built during a boom founded on speculation. Since their failure, Dublin has evidently concentrated on a Guinness, James Joyce and U2-based economy: yet while I was there, several people told me that Dublin isn’t really Irish. The Paddywhackery theme pubs along the Liffey – as one native described them – are the same phenomenon as the pipers in See You Jimmy hats who haunt the Scots Wha Hae pubs on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
Whether they didn’t like immigration into it, or the emigration of young professionals from from it, callers to the local radio station were unhappy with Ireland in 2014. As a talk radio host on RTE said, Dublin is the gun crime capital of Europe, with one death per week. While the violence affects peripheral housing estates rather than the touristy parts, its threat hangs over the city as a whole. 
In some respects, Dublin’s history is underlain by violence: for me, Bolands Flour Mill and its place in the 1916 Rising was soundtracked by David Holmes’ “69 Police” which happened to be playing on the radio as I drove back through Dublin towards the airport. Of course, violence is a tradition in the south of Italy, in the Balkans and in Scottish cities too… and civil society has existed despite and alongside it.
One of the motives to visit Dublin was to meet up again with an Irish architecture student, Kathryn, who I met while on an Erasmus exchange in Athens in 1995. Young professionals in today’s Ireland was met in the person of a serious, moon-faced young man on the DART coming in from Malahide to UCD. He wore a cream linen jacket, loafers and distressed jeans and was absorbed in reading an article about sustainable housing (Accordia and all that) on his iPad. What future for him? 
Will he be forced to emigrate, like previous generations were, only this time to escape the Ponzi scheme of a housing bubble funded by a financial pyramid, fuelled in turn by bank lending secured on ever-rising land values? Or perhaps it was a carousel fraud, with finance houses cross-collateralising and propping each other up until the money-go-round finally ground to a halt. Once that happened, many developers failed, most notably the company behind the regeneration of Battersea Power Station in London which was led by the flamboyant tycoon Johnny Ronan and his business partner Richard Barrett.
Their £5.5bn plan to revamp Battersea collapsed into administration at the end of 2011, when their main lenders – Lloyds Banking Group and Ireland's state "bad bank", the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) – lost patience and put the developers’ holding company into administration. Once Irish developers began to struggle, Irish contractors began looking greedily across the North Channel to find work in the UK.
If the city of Dublin raised the spectre of a failed economic boom, beyond the city lay the cheerful cynics of the Health Service Executive at Portrane who allowed me to shoot photos in a Georgian asylum; and the softly-spoken girl with pale skin and dark hair at the wayside strawberry trailer. In certain parts of Belgium, there are little frites stalls at the roadside, painted bright yellow: in Eire there are roadside strawberry vendors, including one with a kiosk in the form of a giant fibreglass fruit. This was Robert Venturi’s “Duck” put to work in Co. Dublin.
The Irish countryside around Kildare, Cork and Waterford prompted another question. In rural Ireland there are countless bungalows strung out in ribbon developments: it’s no different to Highland Scotland, which it resembles in so many ways. For Irish natives, the mixture of language, culture, landscape and economy makes up their own Internal Landscape and the new bungalows enable them to stay on their patch of soil, which is surely a good thing considering the economic exodus from Ireland.
Yet why do planners hate ribbon development so much? Is it because we were educated in cities – where medium and high-density developments are driven by land prices as well as a tradition of living in tenements – and are unsympathetic to the aspirations of folk in the country? If people want to live in their own detached houses, which is a traditional aspiration in British Isles, is it for us to sneer at them? Is it inverted snobbery, or the French concept of “deformation professionel”?
Arguably there’s no right answer, because adequate housing requires both land reform and bank reform. The supply of sites and the supply of mortgage finance largely dictates the supply of houses. Both of those are political issues, and people will vote for the government which looks like giving them what they want. 
Some would have no development – usually those who already own property and do not care for others to share their good fortune. Urban Realm’s visit to Nairn a few years ago was a clear example of that. Others are keen to see development at all costs – and Ireland’s ill-fated developers perhaps fell into that trap.
Perhaps the most telling thing is that I only saw a couple of truckmixers all the time I was there; the truckmixer, as I’ve written before, is the construction industry’s barometer, bellwether and its green light at the end of the dock all rolled into one.
The second part of this piece will cover a trip to Athens, and try to find common ground between the state of the western fringe of Europe and its eastern edge.
