Artistic riches in the promise of Clare Street

Clare Street is New York and Paris on Sunday evening

Clare Street is New York and Paris on Sunday evening. The shuttered windows of Greene's great bookshop blink in the light from the National Gallery's new Millennium Wing. Headlights shine, the building glows with promise. Even the sky seems starstruck: this is a one-in-a-million night.

Cars draw up to a plain-looking building clad in pale stone. From the street, it gives nothing away. Guards open doors with such flourish you wonder did they practise, and dismiss the notion while you hold your skirts together and sail straight through.

A vista summons. Chamber music, men and women in evening wear, waiters poised with silver trays and standing in line alert for the cue to "go". The architecture is drama, scripted so tautly it tells you your lines. Guests move in the sky-high space like actors on stage, slowly and elegantly, playing their part. You say hello, and smile.

Architects beam at all and sundry. Jim Barrett, Dublin City Architect, looks proud as punch. Benson and Forsythe's design raises the stakes for public buildings, so citizens finally have a picture of what contemporary architecture can do. Others huddle together talking plans and sections and routes between here and now, some worrying that curators will paint the walls in the gallery spaces and wondering if they could get the building listed in response. Precious thoughts.

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My hackles resist rising at the prospect that the art might somehow be dressing the architecture. It is a good building, after all, and it's opening night.

I remember Sir James Stirling in Dublin years ago proclaiming that architecture was the queen of the arts, a rare phrase nowadays because queens aren't what they used to be: all round Ireland, in theatres and galleries hewn from old buildings or made from scratch, people working on the ground face real difficulties when function is obliged to follow form.

Could an Irish firm have done this project, you wonder? On plan yes, the architects think, but once negotiations got down and dirty, local firms would have been less able to resist the forces of compromise. This template will make life easier. To my eye, some details are cloying: overuse of signature carving on the famous walls; doors grained white like kitchen presses a decade ago, and already getting grubby. I surprise a man in the loo who startles me even more because I thought I was in the Ladies, but notice the facilities belong in a smart hotel. That's good.

You feel like you're Somewhere. The space thrills with a sense of occasion, making a line in the sand to say things started here. Up the ante! Ceremonial stairwells rise in expectation of the next discovery; walkways turn your perception inside out. Louis le Brocquy's newly-commissioned Tain tapestry looks kinetic from on high, and no one feels dizzy. The routes lead forward as naturally as country lanes.

I dawdle in the galleries. One visit to the Impressionists will not be enough. Names and images familiar as family but never seen in Dublin before line up to take a bow: Gustave Courbet's wonderful trees, Monet's grain stacks and snow scenes, the Pissarros and the Van Goghs collected by old Bostonians who may have rubbed shoulders with Henry and William James.

The brand matters. Those in the know know what a miracle Carmel Naughton and Ray Keaveney achieved by delivering so impressive a building and populist a show with which to lure viewers in. Paying for such a building and facilities means eventing and marketing art on a scale Ireland has never seen before. It must.

At dinner in the rooms named for George Bernard Shaw, Naughton plays down the difficulties they faced and the history they've made together in favour of thanking the various sponsors who helped this public-private partnership work. Ruffled feathers are smoothed - almost. Síle de Valera thanks the pair and all who supported them, but makes the point that her Government paid its fair share.

Government back in 1854 gave almost nothing when the gallery opened, financed largely by Irish business people approached by the RDS, the RHA and the Royal Irish Academy. Prince Albert had asked them all to educate the masses through art and displays of industry, so that we might all have what's now called access to art and find our spirits lifted.

Strange that, despite changing times and fortunes, the same institutions retain the privilege of automatic membership of the gallery's board. Raising money to keep the gallery operating to the highest standards means it will need all the keys it can get, and they are hardly key institutions in Irish life now.

I slip outside for air and meet a woman who tells me she got hepatitis from a blood transfusion after giving birth in the early 1990s. Perspective once again.

Shaw's statue used to stand out here on the Merrion Square side in honour of his gifting royalties from Pygmalion, and thus My Fair Lady, to the people of Ireland through the National Gallery. Naughton and Keaveney brought him in from the cold a few years ago. I walk back to Clare Street and lean on the new building, looking up while the sky flashes by. There's a touch of the Eliza Doolittles about this evening: rags to riches, talents uncovered, transformation in hand.