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__THE NEW DUBLIN .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

Dublin is a seaside town, and if you take the DART suburban train, within 10 minutes of the center you can be out along Sandymount Strand, where the tide goes out so far the ships seem to be sitting on the sand.

Stay on the DART southwards to Dalkey and you get out at a quiet, prosperous residential area of well-kept cottages and larger Victorian residences hiding up leafy driveways. Just down from the station on the right is a white-fronted Georgian pub, Flanagans. On a wintry weekday afternoon, it's a haven of civilized drinking, and the regulars are a mixture of locals who have lived round here for years and newcomers who have made enough money to buy out here recently.

Along with the economic success, Dublin has recently gained cultural and showbiz kudos it's never had before. To make it, you used to have to leave for London or New York (the irony of Joyce and Beckett being feted in the town of their birth is that they couldn't stand to live there during the ascetic and anti-intellectual decades at the beginning of the century). Now, not only are home-grown stars choosing to stay, but foreign celebs are buying properties here too.

As a result, Dalkey has turned into millionaires' row. Neil Jordan, director of "Interview With the Vampire" and "The Crying Game," lives around the corner from Formula One racing drivers Eddy Irvine and Damon Hill, and up the road lives English soul singer Lisa Stansfield. Farther along the coast, where Killiney Bay sweeps around to Bray Head, lives Bono from U2. When a film's being made here (which happens a lot more than it used to), the big names tend to stay near Dalkey.

Nurse your hot whiskey long enough in Flanagans, and one of the stars might pop in for a drink. Just as multinational corporations find themselves rubbing shoulders with corporation housing at the IFSC, so the international jet set mix with the rest of us in a way that would be unlikely just about anywhere else. I've found myself dining next to half of U2 in Tosca, the Suffolk Street restaurant owned by Bono's restaurateur brother, while friends have bumped into writers Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby out for a drink with Elvis Costello.

Locals are proud that the city is becoming a cool place to be, and the tourists are flocking to the Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, the new National Museum in Collins Barracks, Trinity College and the many other cultural and musical venues that show a new confidence in the city's artistic life.

Central to this cultural tourism should be Temple Bar, an area on the south bank of the Liffey in the heart of the city. When a new bus station was planned, the old warehouses along its cobbled streets became home to artists looking for cheap short-term rents. Funky second-hand clothes and record shops opened, and buskers played in the archway across from the Ha'penny bridge.

The bus station plan was scrapped, and a development group formed to turn the area into Dublin's cultural quarter. The Irish Film Centre was built, gallery space and a children's cultural center created. Next came a music center, a multimedia and computer art venue, the renovated Project Theatre and a photography gallery. The city's answer to London's Covent Garden or the Parisian Left Bank was a palpable hit.

Now, however, things seem to have gone a little awry. The old pubs in the area were renovated and licenses were found for new pubs, boasting "antique" paraphernalia and old advertising signs. Hotels sprang up, catering to the burgeoning weekend break market.

The cultural venues are still there, but it's hard to spot the locals among the groups of English lads over on stag nights and the earnest Germans with their guidebooks and backpacks. On summer weekend evenings, visitors who came to see the real Dublin end up sharing their pints with everyone but Dubliners, who are drinking in pubs a little more off the beaten track. But on a weekday afternoon, Temple Bar is still worth wandering through, even if you keep getting lost because there's a whole new row of delis, cybercafes and expensive apartments built since you were last there.

Back out on Westmoreland Street, the thoroughfare linking O'Connell Bridge to College Green, people are gathering outside Bewleys Oriental Cafe. The four Bewleys cafes in the center of town are closer to national institutions than anything other than the creamy produce of St. James' Gate. Everyone goes to Bewleys, from glamorous women in their 40s, laden down with Brown Thomas bags, to farmers up in town for a day's business.

The food and drink are passable though slightly overpriced, and Bewleys coffee is not the best (especially now that our expectations have been raised by the huge Gaggia machines in the new cafes opening seemingly every day). People wait for their tardy friends outside Bewleys because of the atmosphere of the place. Real fires bathe tables in a warm glow; the decor is all burgundy velvet and dark wood.

You can sit with a pot of tea for hours and not be disturbed while you watch serious young men play chess or groups of Italian students at language college requisition chairs from nearby tables. To fritter away an hour with a friend in Bewleys before stepping out into the Dublin dusk and going your different ways is to spend a perfect afternoon. While sitting in Bewleys, my sister and her boyfriend decided to get married.

If you linger in the cafe, maybe going for an all-day special (chips, baked beans, sausages, bacon and fried egg) to tide you over, the next thought is where to go for a good feed of pints. Foreign visitors to the city can be shocked at the amount that people drink. And not just the amount -- although four or five pints a night is completely unexceptional -- but also the way it appears that everyone drinks to excess as a matter of course. When the country was going through the last recession, you wouldn't have known it from the pubs, and now that people are doing well, whole new drinking opportunities are opening up.

Until the early '90s, all pubs looked the same: stained or frosted glass windows (so you could see neither in nor out), dark wooden bars and a combination of stools, low tables and upholstered seats. The only differences were in how far the particular establishment strayed from the Platonic ideal of the pub, exemplified by such high Victorian classics as Doheny and Nesbitts on Baggot Street or the Long Hall on South Great George's Street.

Then a few cafe-bars started to appear, complete with plate glass windows, cool music and a commitment to food that went beyond the "ham, cheese, or ham and cheese" sandwich cuisine of the more traditional pub. An exclusively young crowd could be seen in the Globe on South Great George's Street or Thomas Read's on Parliament Street, and Dublin suddenly felt cosmopolitan.

Meanwhile, the traditional Dublin pub and its country cousins were being sold around Europe, and Irish pubs opened (and are still opening) at an alarming rate from Madrid to Moscow. These pubs often have a similar feel, with old bikes in the window, and books, bottles, barrels and bellows filling shelves all over the place. The demand for road signs to adorn their walls has grown so great that rural areas in Ireland (not renowned for their overhelpful signposts at the best of times) are seeing those they do have stolen and spirited off to Riga, or some such place. And now, ironically enough, artificial theme bars have replaced the real thing in some parts of Dublin, with traditional pubs turning into parodies of themselves renamed Rasher Geraghty's or the Hairy Lemon.

Nevertheless, whatever type of pub you find yourself in, the craic is still likely to be mighty. You'll not see many espressos ordered in the cafe-bars after 7 p.m., and first among the many unwritten rules of pub etiquette (ahead even of the lore of buying rounds) is that the only thing that will get you out before closing time is if you're going to another pub. Part of the roof collapsed in a city center pub recently, and only the arrival of the fire brigade in full kit persuaded drinkers that they should reluctantly leave their pints behind.

Drinking up time after last orders is generous, and it's often well after midnight before you return to the street. If after-hours entertainment tempts you, there's the traditional black box tackiness of Lesson Street or the star-studded POD on Harcourt Street.

From the inside, Dublin at present looks like a city in vibrant flux. As each new shopping center or apartment complex arrives, an older part of the city is lost. And while the changes bring more choice and greater opportunities, these depend on the partial preservation of what's gone before. The real Dublin of today is neither the old nor the new, but the fruitful co-existence of them both. Whether this balance will remain is hard to say, but those of us who love the place are doing our best to make sure it will.
SALON | March 17, 1998

David Moore is a Dublin journalist whose work has appeared in the Irish Times and the Illustrated London News.