Some time ago a reader of this newspaper complained of lawlessness in her area of Dublin south-central. Roaming bands of violent youths were terrorising the neighbourhood, she complained.

The complainant had an address in one of those areas the governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan, often refers to as over-represented in his prison.

Perhaps she, like me, was one of those people who snapped up a bargain apartment a few years ago, attracted by the "designated area" tax incentives.

The designated area plan meant an additional tax allowance for 10 years, or no tax on any income from renting out the property. But it also meant an interface between the haves and the have-nots.

The new apartments were often built on lands beside corporation flats where indigenous communities have been living for generations.

Now almost all spare space in Aungier Street and its environs has been gobbled up by speculators and investors. Many local pubs have been gutted and given a facelift and cater now for the newer arrivals. All of this is happening in an area that already had little or nothing by way of even a community or leisure centres.

These days, while Mum and Dad from the flats cram into one of the few remaining pubs that will serve them, there's nowhere for the kids to go except the streets. So some nights they stand on the steps of the Aungier Street DIT, site of the old Jacob's biscuit factory, which they will never attend but where representatives of the rest of Irish society study to play their part in the economic miracle. From this vantage point they shout abuse at passers-by.

But the new apartment blocks were built on their common areas: the newly renovated bars were their community's locals. Innocent victims, perhaps, of the discrete ethnic cleansing by the bourgeoisie.

Nothing is being put back into a community that has lost almost all its free space and social amenities.

In one example of crass insensitivity to locals, the corporation sold lands on the corner of Aungier Street and York Street to speculators, who built apartments up against windows of the flats.

Some families whose environment was thus vandalised were eventually compensated in court but the whole sorry episode didn't endear the apartments or their occupants to the local residents. All in all, it is hardly surprising that the back windows of our apartment block are regularly broken, however unfair that is on the completely blameless tenants.

And there's more: how can amenities such as the Iveagh baths, bang in the middle of the Iveagh Trust flats complexes, have been lost to the local community? In less selfish times this problem would be the stuff of protests and demonstrations. At this great stage of our economic miracle the poor seem to have been abandoned. Are we all so selfishly transfixed by our economic success that we have lost our social concern?