Waving an inflatable model of male genitalia - about five feet long, thick as a telegraph pole and coloured a shocking pink, no less - the singing hen party swaggered through the midnight streets. It looked like they had just emasculated Gulliver. They were unmistakably English, their trophy probably continental. (It certainly didn't look like an example of Irish cottage-industry craft-work and surely even the Tiger economy is not manufacturing such specialised accoutrements on an industrial scale?)
Anyway, whatever about the provenance of the prodigious plastic phallus, the performance took place in Temple Bar, Dublin's "cultural quarter". In its way - though admittedly of a different order to say, Handel's 1742 gig in Fishamble Street - perhaps the hen party did provide a Dublin cultural moment. After all, in this city where property fever has made "location, location, location" a mantra of the age, the fact that the location of the bawdiness was Dublin's designated cultural quarter is telling.
The symbolism of the scene was acute: the cultural quarter, it could be argued, was being graphically shafted by its own grubbiness. Its culture is, after all, commerce. Though now increasingly keen to distance itself from bad-for-business stag and hen parties, Temple Bar still remains primarily a commercial centre. Indeed, Dublin itself has become one giant commercial centre and most people who work in the city acknowledge that the price of increased affluence is, in crucial respects, a decreasing quality of life. It's as though much of the city has become an exasperatingly cluttered outdoor office.
The lack of a proper public transport system - and it is still abysmal - is regularly cited as the most pressing problem. Crime too, partly because of the nature of media and the thrust of powerful agendas, routinely features in lists of bad aspects of the capital. Likewise, the cost of houses. Certainly, these are issues which demand attention. But Dublin's greatest problem, more scandalous than ever since the city became wealthy, is poverty.
Apologists for the current and widening wealth gap frequently point to distinctions between absolute poverty and relative poverty. Nobody's starving, they argue. It's not nearly as bad as it was even 50 years ago. This is true. "In the slums around St Patrick's, squalor still huddles in many a corner, many a house, exactly as Swift must have seen it in 1743," wrote the German Nobel Prize-winning writer Heinrich Boll on visiting Dublin in the mid-1950s.
In the almost half-century since Boll's visit, the city has demolished many of its worst slums and created new ones. In the new Dublin, where million-pound houses are not uncommon, neither unfortunately is heroin. To claim that providing people with improved housing and enough to eat is enough, isn't good enough at all. These are not negligible achievements but parts of the city are in such social disarray that, at certain times, buses won't go there, even though buses are often most needed in such areas.
Although it doesn't have the entrenched battle-lines of Belfast, Dublin is nonetheless a divided city. Popularly, the city's principal division is construed as being drawn by the Liffey - between the gritty northside and the snooty southside. Sure, the river has always - understandably too - loomed large in the Dublin imagination. But the city's real faultlines, now as ever, are caused by wealth not water. The property fever of Tiger times has reinforced divisions, fragmenting Dublin - especially suburban Dublin - if not quite into a city of gated mansions and forgotten favellas, then into one which is potentially so.
In provincial and rural Ireland, Dublin, even though the centre of the pivotal Rising of 85 Easters ago took place in the city's main street, remained in folk memory an ambiguous place. It had, of course, been the seat of British rule in Ireland; it has two Protestant cathedrals and no Catholic one; its Pale past - when the entire place was gated against "Irish" intrusion - is, even today, invoked in banter and sometimes even in argument.
Yet the city, whatever about its history and the anachronistic quibbles of Irish Irelanders, is the only one in the Republic - Cork perhaps excepted - deserving of the title. Limerick, Galway, Waterford and the others with city status are certainly places with charms which Dublin has long lost. Though the truth is ultimately perhaps beyond measure (what criteria can you use?), the quality of urban life in such places must be both better and worse in many respects than that endured in Dublin. But that doesn't make them cities in the wider context normally suggested by the term.
But still, pushed by economic forces, Dublin continues to grow. "The leisurely capital of a philosophic land," Boll called it, back in the 1950s. Can you imagine any world-renowned writer saying that of Dublin in 2001? There's more capital than ever in the capital but unless you enjoy spending your leisure time in traffic jams, there's not much in the way of leisure. As for the "philosophic land" . . . well, decide for yourself. It's not that we ought to be nostalgic for the "rare oul' times" Dubbellin of myth. The current version, with its new hotels, ethnic restaurants, relatively affluent young people, immigrants, boom economy and general vibrancy is a much more alive city. The pity is that even such new, positive aspects of Dublin contribute more to the wealthy (who can afford the restaurants and employ the immigrants) than to the poor. The divide is forced ever wider.
As in US cities, where wealth and poverty live edgily side-by-side, meeting only when unavoidable, parts of Dublin now seem to belong to separate countries or, at any rate, separate economies. There will always be divisions, of course, between sought-after areas and less-desired areas and Dublin still has communal city-centre streets. But interaction between wealthy Dublin and poor Dublin is diminishing. Instead of increasing social fluidity, the boom has reinforced many social divisions.
`Beneath all of the trappings of prosperity, there is a deep, underlying anxiety among Dubliners about where the city is going and a growing sense of their own powerlessness in the face of unprecedented social and environmental change," wrote Frank McDonald last year in The Construction of Dublin. An expert on the subject, he's right about underlying anxiety and a widespread sense of individual impotence about developments in Dublin.
But as long as people's more individual anxieties about income, career, house, car and general affluence continue to be fanned by the prevailing commercial propaganda, anxieties about the state of Dublin will remain merely underlying. And there's the rub: people with high incomes and successful careers will live in sought after areas, increasingly separated from financially poorer ones. At a time when belligerent economic methods are atomising society, it's difficult to stimulate a strong sense of inclusive community.
That is what Dublin has lost. It is not the Los Angeles of "26 suburbs in search of a city" but neither is it the human place it used to be. The irony - arguably, the hypocrisy - of this, is that the city continues to sell itself more on the back of its writers than its entrepreneurs, architects or builders. To most of the wider world, Dublin is the historic city of, among others, Joyce, Yeats and Beckett. It has elegant Georgian streets and squares and a few other architectural and historic attractions: the Custom House, the GPO, Christ Church, St Patrick's, Trinity College and the Four Courts, for instance.
But Dublin is not a physically beautiful city. It has character because of Dubliners, not because of its physical infrastructure. Yet many Dubliners must wonder just how they rank on the city's list of priorities. Banished to soulless suburbs with few amenities, many social problems and irregular bus services, most such Dubliners are not getting a fair proportion of the Tiger's loot.
So, as the "location, location, location" mantra of the property market reinforces and even redraws the city's social boundaries, certain locations are earmarked as being of little value. When the market determines that houses in a particular area are of limited value, it inevitably follows that people living there are perceived as being of decreased value too. Listen to the effect market mania has had on Americans who routinely call people who don't own houses "trailer trash".
That's the end of market propaganda: you are trash, if you fail to make money and spend it in a particular way. We haven't arrived at such ignorance in Dublin . . . yet! But if we continue to ape the American way, we could. In Dublin, our history is such that we know heroes and villains come from both big houses and small houses. In fact, "location, location, location" doesn't matter a whit in moral terms.
However, the fact that the mantra's greatest intensity is historically located in this age suggests a Temple Bar hen (or stag) party crudeness in among the growing knowledge of fine wines, foreign foods, the stock market and the rest of what presents itself nowadays as "sophistication". Mind you, not all Dubliners are fooled. There's hope.