Cherry Orchard, Summerhill and Neilstown in Dublin . . . Knocknaheeney in Cork . . . Ballinacurra in Limerick . . . These are just a few of the areas with public housing which are struggling to overcome more than their fair share of trouble and disadvantage. Throughout not just the Republic, but Europe as a whole, there is no longer any argument that social housing has created social problems rather than solving them.
Scattered around the country, but concentrated in Dublin, there are neighbourhoods of enormous social need, yet to name them is seen as politically incorrect. For many reasons, newspapers such as this one tend to avoid identifying estates where there has been trouble, for fear of stigmatising them and thus adding to their problems. But this policy of not naming the names may be, ultimately, unhelpful for some of these places because it makes it too easy for politicians to side-step a social crisis which the Celtic Tiger has been too selfish to confront. Increasingly, voices in some of these places are keen to be heard talking about the struggles that go on there.
"The kids are the future and we have to make it happen for them", says Marion Doyle, a community activist in Cherry Orchard, where 65 per cent of the 5,200 population is under 25 and yet there is no school. She wants people to hear about the majority of "good young people" who want education and opportunities. In parts of the area the unemployment rate is unbelievably high - 80 per cent in Gallanstown and 45 per cent in Clover Hill, for example, and yet there is very little by way of facilities for young people, a situation which can only be described as gross government neglect.
Another community activist from Cherry Orchard refuses to speak to the media because she believes that doing so only adds to stigmatisation and serves politicians, who can be adept at using the media's highlighting of an estate as an opportunity to hype whatever projects they themselves have supported. She has a point, but the argument in favour of identifying estates haunted by chronic drug abuse, crime and vandalism is also convincing.
Anne Power, author of Estates On The Edge, an important study of the mass government-sponsored housing estates of Europe - including the high-rise housing in Ballymun - believes that "being coy about naming estates can compound the problems and can let the politicians off the hook. If you name names, what's important is to tell the whole story. There are huge riches and amazing leaders in Irish communities, as well as very ordinary people who want to lead ordinary lives." On the cover of her book is a picture of Ballymun, which she features, having studied it intensively over a five-year period.
Compared with the rest of Europe, Irish estates have the highest proportion of self-help groups and the lowest allocations of resources for things such as education, leisure, shopping and childcare, she found. In the Republic today - as for decades - there are areas of social exclusion and government neglect which threaten social unrest.
In Estates On The Edge, Power, a Reader in Housing and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, writes that it was Irish "estates", such as Ballymun's high-rise housing, which alerted her to the existence in the world of "ghettos" without race. Until she examined the social conditions on Irish housing estates, Ms Power believed that racial issues were the prime cause of the varying degrees of stigmatisation suffered by the residents of estates throughout Europe and in US cities such as New York.
In the Republic, however, Power saw for the first time white people of similar background to the rest of society being stigmatised in an even worse way than people of colour and "foreigners" were in other countries. She came to the conclusion that it was the very fact of living on a particular estate which created the stigma.
"In the same way as blacks were cordoned off in the US, Ireland is cordoning off white people with low skills who can't compete in the modern economy. The Irish case illustrates that it is the economy rather than race which creates ghettos," she believes.
Power is a British woman of Irish descent who has devoted much of her career to her comparative analysis of conditions on the enormous, concrete mass housing estates of the UK and mainland Europe where residents cannot resist being marginalised. She has written four previous books on the subject.
Some of the Republic's public housing estates are the most stigmatised in Europe, she has concluded. A stigma, according to the dictionary definition, is a distinguishing mark of social disgrace. For Irish citizens who live in some, troubled public housing estates, their only "disgrace" is to have what many regard as the wrong address.
In Neilstown and Ronanstown in Dublin, some residents have taken to calling their area "North Clondalkin" in an attempt to evade such prejudice, much of which, they argue, emanates from media coverage of problems in their area.
"This is a thriving human community full of local organisations made up of positive, strong human beings", says community worker John Bennett, in what he prefers to be called North Clondalkin, where a new community centre in Neilstown is being built. North Clondalkin is listed as one of the areas of need in the National Anti-Poverty Strategy and has an unemployment rate of 60-70 per cent in some public housing estates. Despite this fact, the existence of hundreds of local initiatives points to the people's strengths rather than weaknesses, he argues.
Power, in common with many residents of such estates, blames the media for hyping problems and reinforcing stigma, but there is a historical background too. "This stigma is deeply rooted in the struggles of the 19th century, and in the fact that the Irish so strongly support the concept of owner-occupation, with an ownership rate of 80-90 per cent," says Power. "Anyone stranded in rented accommodation is considered a failure by Irish society. Irish law explicitly states that public housing is for people who cannot help themselves, which gets it off to a bad footing."
In Europe, housing is seen as a social need and liaisons between tenants and estate managements tends to be highly developed and democratic. By contrast, Ms Power observed in the Republic a reluctance on the part of Dublin and Cork Corporations to view tenants as consumers who had a right to a say in how their estates were run. Management tended to be aloof and bureaucratic, rarely venturing onto the estates themselves, she found.
The reputations which some estates gained as "no go" areas where only social workers dared to tread have their historical basis in the social upheaval after the second World War, which pushed European governments into dealing with chronic housing shortages by building thousands of large, concrete estates in cellular form on an inhuman scale in an attempt to cope with an unforeseen explosion in urban populations.
Ireland copied this model - and experienced similar consequences. "Gradually as overall housing shortages diminished, the populations that could not realistically aspire to ever more popular, owner-occupied houses of a very different style and smaller-scale ended up often feeling trapped in, or coerced into, estates which were marginalised, stigmatised and rejected by mainstream society."
Public housing became so unpopular that many of the economically active households got out. In Dublin this was exacerbated by the surrender grant of 1985, a disastrous policy in hindsight which helped Irish families to get a foothold in private accommodation, but had the effect of further destabilising estates by encouraging the most stable and best-resourced residents to abandon ship.
"The surrender had a devastating effect on the large conurbations," says Pat Rabbitte, Democratic Left TD. "Community leaders were hoovered out and those with get up and go, got up and went. They tended to be replaced by the unemployed."
In Ballymun, the exodus of economically active households resulted in a high level of vacancies which were then filled by an influx of "marginal" people, says Power. Rapid turnover led to community instability and "conflict between those more established residents who resented the estate's decline and the newcomers with poor prospects who realised they were being `dumped' on the estate".
The result, she concludes, was a concentration of youthful households, young single mothers and transient, previously homeless men - which led to many unstable relationships. Lone mothers - many of whom had difficulties with the full responsibilities of parenting and housekeeping - tended to form a succession of unstable relationships with young men. Some of these resulted in violent domestic scenes and rivalries, which further tarnished the estate's image.
The lack of facilities for the huge numbers of children and young people sometimes resulted in vandalism as a form of recreation, as well as a way of expressing resentment.
"The resultant growing social conflict, loss of control, rising crime and negative media publicity was as disastrous in Ireland as in the other countries," she adds. "The outcome was the extreme polarisation of the estate and an intense malaise within it."
The special social service and family support teams put into Ballymun were inadequate to allay the social fragmentation which occurred. As strong adult rolemodels disappeared, young people understood less and less the boundaries of behaviour.
"Ireland is better off in some ways and worse in others. Because it is smaller and more homogenous, there are stronger social networks even in very desolate areas. But you are moving terribly fast in the direction of European countries in terms of all the pressures of lone parenthood on these estates," she warns.
Experience elsewhere in Europe, she points out, shows a relationship between lone parenthood, vandalism and ultimately crime. "Boys find it very hard growing up in communities where women are so on their own and where male role-models are few and far between. Police figures are not good substitutes for father figures," she says, stressing that she herself speaks as a lone parent and does not wish to apportion blame.
The reality in her view is, however, that mothers may have difficulty exercising control over teenage boys with problems. The key to preventing problems on estates in the Republic will be in giving boys a useful role and helping them to succeed in school, she thinks. In the new economy, girls are being chosen for jobs over boys due to their dexterity and keyboard skills.
"Boys will tell you: `I want to use my this' - and they hold up their fists. Those jobs don't exist any more."
The 1996 ministerial report on the heroin epidemic concluded that one of the greatest needs on troubled estates was for more sport and recreation facilities for youths. The previous government earmarked £20 million for this purpose. The current Government reduced this to £1.25 million in the recent Budget, while giving £20 million to the GAA for Croke Park and lowering tax rates in a way which favoured the better off. Independent TD, Tony Gregory, believes that the Government's refusal to grant the funding "destroyed the one hope that a lot of communities had of getting something that would help the drug problem". He agrees the Government can get away with such inaction as long as estates remain stigmatised, marginalised and ghettoised and the politically correct turn a blind eye.
Gregory warns of social unrest in these massive conurbations. "One third of children are living in poverty, yet we are told that the economy is booming and we've never had it so good and you go back to the recent Budget and see that it directs the benefits to those who least need them. The whole thing is structured so a huge proportion of the population have little or no stake in the long term. Of course you will have social unrest when you create a huge mass of aberrated people. It has already happened in some areas. It seems to me to be inevitable," he says.
Anne Power concludes that "our whole society is changing to the point of no return - the composition of our families and our city populations, for example. There is a sense of chaos, because old welfare systems no longer match the problems we face."
Public housing in the Republic will remain socially divisive until policy-makers start taking a bottom-up approach to social housing in which residents become involved and are properly resourced, she believes. Unless people, especially the young, are made to feel included, rather than excluded, social chaos will be a forgone conclusion.
Estates On The Edge by Anne Power is published by MacMillan in the UK. Price £57 sterling.