ANYONE who has been to Frankfurt has probably been to Sachsenhausen - the "nighttown" zone of Germany's financial capital.

It is an area full of quaint cobbled streets where nearly every building is either a bar, a restaurant, a nightclub or a tourist trinket shop. And night after night, it's thronged with revellers having a "good time".

Temple Bar is becoming Dublin's Sachsenhausen. Its cobbled streets are also peppered with pubs, restaurants and nightclubs. The main drag, along Temple Bar and East Essex Street, is thronged at weekends by drinkers on a seemingly endless pub crawl. The atmosphere can be unsavoury, even dangerous.

Temple Bar has become a "must" for lager louts, including increasingly large numbers of English stag-party types who find Dublin a fun place for intensive drinking. They can be seen, especially during the summer, making their way from pub to pub, roaring out their party songs, urinating in doorways and inflicting themselves on the public.

During the Saint Patrick's Festival, for example, strollers were horrified by what one described as a "virtual pitched battle" between gardai and Irish lager louts in Temple Bar Square. Auriga, a restaurant on the square, closed before 8 p.m. rather than risk leaving its patrons to negotiate their way through the melee.

Meeting House Square, the area's other principal public space, also had to be closed at 6 p.m. every day since its fanfare inauguration last June (unless there was a specific event on) because of fears that it would be trashed. Now protected by security cameras and a night watchman, its opening hours have been extended to accommodate the new Eden restaurant.

Given that one of the primary goals of the Temple Bar project was to create new "public spaces", the need to erect gates around Meeting House Square and to close them - even for eight hours every night - is an admission of failure. However, it is an inevitable consequence of the way the licensed trade has overwhelmed Temple Bar.

Since 1991, when it was designated for development as Dublin's "cultural quarter", almost an acre of drinking space has been added to the area, according to figures obtained recently by the Green Party city councillor, Mr Ciaran Cuffe.

That's enough room for 8,000 extra drinkers, at a conservative density of two people per square metre, or as many as 12,000, at a density of three per square metre.

In 1991 there were 10 licensed premises in the Temple Bar designated area, including those on perimeter streets, such as Dame Street. Now there are nearly 30, including some very large pubs.

Some licences were acquired elsewhere and "reversed" into the area and the provision of new "hotels" entitled developers to install pubs with their own street entrances.

This has been aided by substantial tax incentives, worth millions of pounds to the developers, sanctioned by Temple Bar Renewal, the State company set up to ensure there would be a balanced mix of uses in the redevelopment. Yet although its board is widely representative, including Bord Failte, for example, it has failed to achieve this objective.

Without TBR's approval, the owner or occupier of a building in Temple Bar cannot avail of the tax incentives. But even the Government's urban renewal review, published last December, notes that the company has never invoked its power to refuse approvals "on the grounds that one use type may have been overdeveloped, resulting in an unbalanced use pattern in the area".

Despite repeated complaints from representatives of local residents, the senior Department of the Environment official on the TBR board, Mr Finian Matthews, said it had no power to control the extent of any use, including pubs. Thus, rather than acting as a watchdog with its eye on long-term sustainability, TBR was reduced to a rubber-stamp.

Dublin Corporation, as the planning authority for the area, had little hesitation in granting planning permission for all thee new pubs and extensions to existing premises.

Only now are its planners having second thoughts; they have begun a study on the impact of the licensed trade on Temple Bar. In terms of timing, this is like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Turning the area into the "Temple of Bars", as one leading member of An Taisce dubbed it, was never part of the official agenda; indeed, the word "pubs" is barely mentioned in the 1992 development programme of Temple Bar Properties.

Its goal was to create "a bustling cultural, residential and small business precinct that will attract visitors in significant numbers".

BP managed to secure £40 million in EU and Exchequer aid for the development of 10 cultural centres, under the Operational Programme for Tourism.

To justify this, it had to show that pedestrian movement in the area was increasing all the time; indeed, it has trebled since 1991. But the bulk of Temple Bar's patrons are not coming for the cultural centres; they're coming for the drink and the craic.

Yet TBP, the State development agency, has played a leading role in the major expansion of the area's licensed trade. According to a detailed analysis by An Taisce, TBP was directly involved in the creation of four large new pubs - Fitzsimons, the Porterhouse, the Front Lounge and another about to open at Essex Gate - and in facilitating the extension of three existing premises.

Take the Temple Bar pub, for example. Eight years ago, when it was known as Flannery's, it consisted of a single room. It was then acquired by Mr Hugh O'Regan, the pub transformation wizard, and expanded to include two adjoining buildings, both previously owned by TBP.

In 1994, he sold it on for more than £800,000, roughly six times what he paid for the original premises.

The new owner, Mr Tom Cleary, bought another adjoining building from TBP and later got planning permission from Dublin Corporation for a scheme which will produce 3,200 square feet of drinking space, more than 10 times the size of the original pub. The new Temple Bar pub, rising behind retained facades, will be a boozerama with a beer garden.

Two of the much-hyped cultural centres also generate most of their revenue from selling drink. In cash terms, the Irish Film Centre in Eustace Street is a bar which happens to have two cinemas attached. Film buffs must make their way through a glazed courtyard cluttered with tables and chairs to go to the movies; as designed, this courtyard was meant to be open.

The Temple Bar Music Centre manages to survive by the dint of having a late-night licence until 2 a.m., seven days a week.

A loud jukebox and/or heavily-amplified live music gigs in the bar have created a serious noise nuisance for nearby residents; the bar was never intended as a venue in its own right and, unlike the centre's "black box" auditorium, it is not acoustically insulated.

Restaurants, too, have proliferated, including large establishments such as Thunder Road on Fleet Street and Luigi Malone's on Fownes Street.

They are also consuming space supposed to be for shops; a hostel under construction on Temple Lane was to have three ground-floor retail units, but the developer wants to turn these over to restaurant use.

HIS trend reflects the failure of retail in the area. Several shops have already closed down, including Nature

Works on Crow Street, a candlemaker on Temple Lane and, most notably, the Italian delicatessen on Cecilia Street.

After the delicatessen, Padania's opened in 1995, ironically, its owners were featured in TBP's promotional advertisements describing, Temple Bar as the perfect choice for them.

"Retail in Temple Bar is a huge success," declared one such advertisement. Many retailers sold on the hype feel betrayed and some of them have lost a lot of money. Several units on Crow Street have been vacant for two years; the ground floor, first floor and basement of the Green Building are lying empty since it was completed in the autumn of 1994.

Part of the reason is that, other than the main north-south route through Crown Alley, most pedestrian movement in Temple Bar is at night when the shops are shut. Secondly, TBP's policy has been to sign up tenants on high rent commercial leases and then sell on their units to private investors availing of the tax incentives. Only now is it considering temporary lettings at reasonable rents.

The area's infrastructure is not properly managed either. Streets are poorly lit with fake-Victorian lamps from the days of Jack the Ripper. Footpaths are frequently stained with urine, vomit and oil from numerous illegally-parked cars. On Sunday mornings, it is not uncommon to find broken glass, beer bottles and other debris strewn around.

These problems, failures and mistakes do not rate a mention in TBP's updated development programme, released last week by the company's managing director, Ms Laura Magahy.

Instead, it is an unashamed public relations exercise, hailing Temple Bar as "one of Europe's most innovative and successful urban renewal projects... a vibrant living community ... a unique quarter of cultural diversity".

TBP has always claimed it was "building on what has already taken place spontaneously in the area

But the old Temple Bar was characterised by bohemian smallness in its art galleries, alternative shops, restaurants and pubs. It has been built over rather than built on and supplanted by something which has some of the pretensions of Covent Garden but is closer to Sachsenhausen.

None of this is intended to detract from Temple Bar's successes - notably its award-winning contemporary architecture or the many events promoted by TBP, such as last summer's series of outdoor movies in Meeting House Square. It is an argument for honesty in acknowledging the State's failure to steer this. "flagship" urban renewal project towards balanced and sustainable development.