The opening of Ireland's newest shopping centre is as much about driving as it is about shopping. Even the adverts for Ireland's latest out-of-town shopping mall concentrate on motorways, not merchandise. "What do you get when you cross the M50 with the N4?" runs the ad. Some punters are already replying "More Traffic Chaos", but the advertiser's preferred answer is "The Liffey Valley Shopping Experience".
When the new centre is complete, early in the next century, shoppers will be able to buy everything from a new car to a toothbrush, all in the same environmentally-controlled, easily accessible, uniformly bland surroundings.
There'll be no big razzmatazz on Thursday when the 70 shops in the first phase of the massive centre open their doors and the expected hordes start pulling into the 23-acre car park. The developers have opted for what in the PR business is known as a soft opening - the ribbon-cutting and the photo opportunities will come some time next month, with the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
In any case, grand openings are a sore subject among mall-owners these days. The atmosphere at the opening ceremony for Manchester's new mega-mall, the three-mile-long, Trafford Centre, was less bright than it might have been after harsh words from local hero, singer Mick Hucknall. Much to the embarrassment of everyone involved, he reacted to the notion that he might be called upon to open the centre by saying, very publicly, that "a city centre is about the buzz of people and great buildings; the Trafford Centre is about the supremacy of Mammon and bad taste".
The Liffey Valley Centre in its turn is another bona fide temple of boom, with the usual list of statistics to prove it. By the time construction is complete some time in 2002, there will be a 14-screen cinema, the biggest retail park in the country, a leisure centre, a themed heritage trail, a 140-bedroom hotel and a pub which, at 14,000 square foot, will be of football-pitch proportions.
More than 3,000 people will serve up to 250,000 shoppers every week (and the centre's managers will know exactly how many people have crossed the threshold because they have installed a sophisticated electronic system to count heads). The developers predict the shoppers will come from as far afield as Mullingar in Co Westmeath, some 50 or so miles: they say the centre has 1.45 million potential customers.
Oddly, the least impressive element of the centre is the line-up of shops in terms of originality. The two anchor tenants are Marks & Spencer and the Dutch-owned, mid-market department store C & A. The UK chemist chain, Boots, comes a close third in term of shop size. If all that sounds boringly familiar in a British-highstreet sort of way then so will the rest of the line-up because the list continues with Principles, Next, Virgin, Vision Express, Oasis, Dorothy Perkins, Carphone Warehouse and, of course, the Body Shop. The vast majority of the shops are UK chains, although some Irish retailers - including Carl Scarpa and Budget Travel - are taking up the smaller units.
Clearly, therefore, all that extra square footage of retail space is no guarantee of increased consumer choice. In this latest outpost of Middle England, Irish shoppers will be able to buy little different to what they can now purchase in Dublin city centre or other malls. It's the same with the food in the Miami Beach-themed, 600-seater food court which, while it is an attractive space overlooking the central mall, is pretty much a case of fast food and chips with everything.
One true-blue first is the planned "Motor Mall", which will house six separate car-dealerships under one roof. If the very name makes you feel you've been beamed up from Lucan and set down in Dallas, that's not so surprising - malls are a US concept and a motor mall is a logical enough extension.
But the real key to any centre's success is its anchor tenant, and the Liffey Valley developers believe it has a major draw in Marks & Spencer. This is the first time the UK chain has moved out of town in Ireland: M&S will have only groceries available in the entire centre - a real clue about the variety of customer being chased.
Presumably, the sheer size of the centre would be headline-grabbing if it were the first of its kind - but in reality, just up the road is the Blanchardstown Centre and a little further on out the motorway is The Square in Tallaght. Thanks to the new roads, each can say it has first claim on the 40 per cent of the population which is theoretically in their shared catchment areas - but how many potential customers have the cars and the spending power to justify the average of one hour and 50 minutes that research has shown people spend on a trip to the mall?
The Blanchardstown Centre, for instance, has had huge commercial success - but try telling that to frustrated customers stuck in the perpetual weekend traffic jams trying to get in - or worse still out - of the centre.
In Manchester, the AA has been forced to take the drastic step of warning motorists to avoid the Trafford Centre area entirely - a tricky manoeuvre given that in malls, the car is king. With gridlock looming, the joke in Manchester is that the bumper-cars in Trafford's leisure centre will be going faster than the cars on the nearby motorways. Here, the AA is taking a more pragmatic approach. The AA's spokesperson Conor Faughnan welcomes the Liffey Valley Centre as a sign of a booming economy and points out that there are traffic problems everywhere. "Traffic delays," he says, "are a side-effect of development and Blanchardstown, for example, is a victim of its own success."
But in fact there are daily tailbacks and traffic jams on the already chaotic N4, while queues approaching the roundabouts on the M50 are a regular feature of life for drivers heading west out of the city.
In an effort to spread the traffic chaos, the Liffey Valley Centre will open even longer hours than its competitors. Shops will stay open until 9 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and there will be the usual late-night shopping on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, shops will stay open until 8 p.m. "Those hours are going to really help commuters," says Kevin Duffey, director of the centre, "and they'll ease the pressure on the roads at peak hours." Good news for consumers, but probably less so for retailers trying to recruit the necessary 3,000 staff.
Duffy is conscious of the difficulty that even city centre shops now have in recruiting staff and has opened a Retail Academy on site, where potential employees will be trained and then available to retailers.
So with a shopping centre at Blanchardstown a short hop away and Tallaght just up the road, it would seem that Dublin's western suburbs are in for a new millennium featuring a burgeoning mall culture in which families go shopping for recreation and the lure of environmentally-controlled surroundings and clamp-free parking is simply irresistible - for now at least.