IT IS June 17th, 1988, Dublin Millennium year. The sun shines down on the lord mayor Carmencita Hederman and other dignitaries, including Michael Smurfit, as they gather for the unveiling of the Anna Livia monument in O'Connell Street.
Ms Hederman and Dr Smurfit smile for the cameras and toss coins into the fountain, saying they hope the gesture will bring luck to Dublin and all those who pass along the capital city's main street.
Within seconds, as Ms Hederman begins to speak, the line to the loudspeakers is cut, halting her speech. Four hundred anti-extradition protesters begin chanting; gardai arrive in numbers.
Scuffles break out, a number of youngsters are chased down the street and are dragged, punching and struggling, into a squad car. The unveiling breaks up in disorder and booing.
As Dr Smurfit and the lord mayor leave with a Garda escort, bad omens are almost visibly forming in the air. The next morning, as many had predicted, the first bits of rubbish are found in the fountain.
Last week in a move called Operation Mainstreet, gardai were back at the fountain, arresting suspected drug-dealers who use it as the regular place to meet customers. According to Garda sources, over 100 suspected drug-dealers have been arrested as part of the operation, which began five weeks ago.
Nowadays there is rarely water in the monument, and when there is it is often full of empty crisp bags and discarded syringes. The public toilets, situated in the middle of the street, are regarded as off-limits by most shoppers, and local traders say they are used by rent boys and people injecting heroin.
Last year almost 1,000 people were arrested on the street for breaches of public order. Chief Supt Dick Kelly, heading Operation Mainstreet, says syringe robberies are the worst problem.
In March Niail St Leger from Crumlin was assaulted outside the Abrakebabra fast-food restaurant in Upper O'Connell Street. After being kicked and punched by a number of youths, he fell and banged his head on the ground. He was rushed to hospital and put on a life-support machine. Within two days he was dead. One of the most vicious assaults took place in 1992 when a young Donegal GAA fan died after being beaten for over five minutes by a mob.
While these kinds of incidents are exceptional, each week muggings, shoplifting and stabbings take place day and night. Such crimes combined with the physical environment of the street make for a gloomy contrast with the bustle and opulence of Grafton Street or the avant garde and international atmosphere of Temple Bar.
O'CONNELL STREET is supposed to be Dublin's premier thoroughfare, but with its persistent litter problem, garish neon signs and over-abundance of fast-food joints, it has rarely been held in lower public esteem.
It is associated with everything tacky and plastic in urban development, and last week's Garda operation underlined the extent of its danger.
Dermot Flood is one man familiar with the street who remembers when things were different. "We would cycle down from Dorset Street and leave, not lock, our bikes in the middle of the street. Then we would go to a coffee bar, before going dancing in Clerys. After dancing ended at 11, we would get a quick ice-cream and head for home."
Dermot is the head porter at the Gresham Hotel, from where he has observed life for more than 50 years. "I used to be dead proud to work at the Gresham, because families used to see me at work when they would call in for afternoon tea."
He says all his friends used to spend hours on the street. "You would just arrive and walk up and down the street, meeting people and going for coffee. Later you could go to the Metropole cinema. All this was done without worrying about trouble."
He remembers a Garda Moynes who used to patrol the street. "If you took a look out the door at any time, he seemed to be there. Now we have to ring for a guard he says.
Such recollections can sound utopian and nostalgic, but the proof is there beside the Gresham Hotel. Around the hotel is one newsagent, a bar and several shops which have been shuttered for years.
"There used to be some great shops in that area of the street like O'Byrne and Fitzgibbon, Kingston menswear and Hamilton Long," says Peter McDowell, owner of McDowell's jewellers, which has had a presence on the street since the last century. "You had the old Press building, dance halls, furniture stores and boutiques."
IT IS easy to date the beginning of the decline. At 32 a.m. on March 8th, 1966, the IRA blew up Nelson's Pillar, leaving just a concrete stump. The vital focal point, meeting place and indispensable heart of the street was gone. After this, alternative meeting places never really caught on.
Whether by coincidence or not, the decline of the street in terms of development, style and tone can be dated from this point.
O'Connell Street evolved in the 17th century on land owned by Henry Moore, third Earl of Drogheda, and was originally called Drogheda Street. This narrow street was demolished in the 1740s by Luke Gardiner, who rebuilt the street, widened it by 160 ft and built a central mall called Gardiner's Mall.
A small residential square soon formed called Sackville Mall where professional people and the monied members of parliament lived. Until 1777, the street did not extend to the river, but in that year the Wide Streets Commissioners started to build a new bridge over the Liffey.
The bridge was opened in 1795 in conjunction with major improvements to D'Olier Street and Westmoreland Street. The street steadily developed, with residential housing consolidated in the northern half and the GPO built in 1820.
In 1916 large sections of the street were burned out in the Rising, and further damage was done during 1922 at the outbreak of the Civil War.
The kind of shops and the goods they sold in this period can be read in the accounts of looting which took place during Easter Week 1916, when street urchins were seen walking around in expensive knee-high boots used by horse riders.
Up until the 1960s, nothing dramatic was done to change the street. However, within a few months of the pillar explosion, an almost imperceptible trend began.
Aer Lingus demolished two fine buildings it was using which were replaced by the Royal Dublin Hotel. Another Georgian building, which had been used as the Catholic Commercial Club, was left derelict for a decade and later followed the same route as the Aer Lingus buildings.
From this point, the street seemed to succumb to a planning nightmare. Well-remembered was the destruction in March 1973 of Gilbeys, an ornate Victorian building with an impressive facade. The replacement was a crude office block which did not fit in with the rest of the street's distinctly non-modern architecture.
The street was beginning to plunge downward, but worse was to come. As Tom Rea, general manager of Clerys department store, puts it, "the hamburger arrived".
Irish architecture in the 1960s had an obsession - the US. Although never officially proclaimed, the street seemed to be ear-marked as a piece of Americana in Dublin. In came neon, garish and in the brightest colours possible, burger joints, amusement arcades, bright lights, hoardings, sandwich-boards.
Dick Gleeson, a senior executive planner with Dublin Corporation, which is the custodian of the street, has been dealing with O'Connell Street for years.
"Everything American was trendy during the 1960s. Architects, planners, surveyors all wanted to emulate the streetscape of the large Americans cities. We are now dealing with the legacy of that."
Even the cinemas changed their ways. Their billboards which advertised films came to resemble the average American movie theatre. Coffee shops became fast-food shops and within five years Irish-owned small businesses were gone.
Planning was given for almost any kind of project. When the leases of smaller Irish shops came up for renewal, they were given to other enterprises, by and large fast-food operations. This development continued throughout the 1980's.
Dermot Flood, watching from the Gresham remembers. "When the first McDonalds came, we all went down to get chips and burgers. The crowds were enormous, abut the novelty wore off very quickly."
TODAY things have not changed. On the west side of the street, just after passing O'Connell Bridge, there is one chemist and one shoe chop. The rest of the premises area either fast-food outlets or bargain shops.
Frank McGee, chief executive i9f Dublin Tourism, says: "There is very little for the tourist down there, apart from the two fine hotels." Ciaran Conlon, research assistant with the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, says O'Connell Street is part of a "valley-effect" in planning.
"You have great regeneration to the west in Smithfield and Temple Bar and in the east you will soon have the docks development, but in the O'Connell Street area seems to cave been part of this amazing oversight."
Nobody in Dublin Corporation can explain why this is so. Others offer simple explanations. Tom Coffey, chief executive of the Dublin City Centre Business Association, says it is "a case of snobbery".
He says the old culture among Dublin Corporation staff from which he excludes the current city manager, John Fitzgerald - associated O'Connell Street with the deprivation of surrounding areas, such as Sean MacDermott street. As a result, greater efforts were concentrated on developing the city's south side.
As no one lived on O'Connell Street, there was less reason for politicians and city councillors toe act on its problems. Planning laws in Dublin, unlike other European cities, do not contain provision to stop ugly shopfronts being erected.
The main Planning Act of 1963, which governs local authority planning, does not make it possible to stop a proliferation of one kind of development. This may be what caused O'Connell Street's descent into tastelessness.
It also lacks a large attraction or anchor project. Traders and public representatives describe the Government's decision not to site the national conference centre on the Carlton cinema site on Upper O'Connell Street as a "mortal blow".
Former Labour Party TD Joe Costello, who lives just off O'Connell Street in Sean MacDermott Street, says this seemed to suggest it was regarded by Government as a negative and declining street.
The city centre business association hosted a delegation of Dutch business people recently and they were appalled at the dirt on the street. They had never seen so many pieces of chewing gum stuck to a street in their lives," he says.
The decision two years ago by Dublin Tourism to close its office there also attracted great controversy. Even in February 1994, not long before his retirement, city manager Frank Feely, in a moment of considerable understatement, said the upper part of the street suffered from "a lack of activity involving public usage".
Considering that one of the main sites in the area beside the Carlton cinema has been derelict for nearly 20 years, this is not surprising.
DESPITE the record of neglect, Dublin Corporation says it is determined that O'Connell Street will be regenerated in the Temple Bar/Smithfield fashion.
What it calls a "civic thoroughfare", like those found in other European cities, is the desired outcome. "We are seriously considerding tax designation for O'Connell Street," says Dick Gleeson, who has formulated the corporation's policy on the street.
Green Party councillor Ciaran Cuffe, who is on the corporation's planning committee, says planning permission should not be given for certain buildings. Tom Coffey wants Bertie Ahern to champion O'Connell Street's regeneration like Charles Haughey championed Temple Bar.
His association will hold a design competition in the autumn for architects and surveyors to come up with suitable millennium projects. In the meantime, the corporation has recruited extra cleaning staff to tackle the litter problem over the summer.
Tom Coffey welcomes this. "I think they should start by hosing down the whole street."