The queue looping twice around the foyer of the Civic Offices grows and grows. There's no jostling or pushing. Developers, TDs, campaigners and one knight of the Order of the Dannebrog wait in an orderly fashion to buy their own copy of Frank McDonald's book, hot off the presses and entitled The Construction of Dublin.
Kate O'Carroll, an English teacher, recalls "lying down in front of bulldozers on this very spot" in 1979. She has known Frank ever since. John Henry, head of the Dublin Transportation Office, finds 14 references to himself in the book's index. His wife, Celine, is more concerned to plug the Anna Livia International Opera Festival, which will be held in Dublin next month. The newly-appointed chair of An Bord Pleanala, John O'Connor, is also in attendance, clutching his own copy of the book but unable to say if he's in there or not.
Donal Mangan, director of Luas, has known Frank "through thick and thin" since the 1970s, he says, standing beside his daughter, economist Eimear Mangan. He says the Light Rail Project is "on target" and that the service will be starting at the end of 2002. Sean Finlay, a geologist, recalls acting as Frank's campaign manager when he ran for student union president in UCD back in 1970. Eileen Ross says she and her husband featured in Frank's first book The Destruction of the City. Theirs was a long saga, she says, but they succeeded in holding back the bulldozers in the end. Prof Kevin B Nowlan, who retired from UCD in 1986, tells the assembled that Frank McDonald "doesn't destroy people - he lets them destroy themselves". Frank's sister Edel McDonald is here with her family and her mother and father Maura and William McDonald, who are very proud of their son. Edel says "he was the local guide for all the cousins in our family who would come up from Wexford." "I used to call him the courier," says his mother.
Dr Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum, explains that he was dubbed a knight by the Queen of Denmark at a ceremony last week for his on-going research in all things Viking.