SO THE Arts Council wants £30 million to build a centre for the performing arts in Dublin's docklands. The idea has generally received a warm welcome, as indeed it should.
According to the council, it would be a "multi venue centre with a range of performance facilities for theatre, opera, dance and musicals" - the kind of place which would attract "artists and audiences from all over Ireland and from abroad". The council also believes that such a centre would serve as an appropriate cultural project to mark the millennium.
But can we really afford to spend £30 million on a centre for the performing arts in the docklands and another £30 million on a National Convention Centre in the Royal Dublin Society's showgrounds in Ballsbridge? That these two schemes are being treated as stand alone projects is merely another example of the type of muddled thinking that passes for "planning" in Ireland.
And yet the solution is staring us in the face - to combine the two in a highly flexible multi purpose venue, using the marvellous Waterfront Hall in Belfast as our model. That's the only course which makes sense.
The process of procuring a national convention centre has been nothing less than a fiasco, reflecting no credit on Bord Failte or on the Minister for Tourism and Trade, Enda Kenny, and his Department. Three years have passed since this project - was earmarked for funding under the EU aided Operational Programme for Tourism.
In theory, it must be up and running by the end of 1999 to have any chance of "drawing down" some £23 million in EU funding. Yet it hasn't got even to planning application stage - and there can be no certainty that such an application for the RDS site would succeed.
It is now 15 months since Mr Kenny aborted a tender competition for the convention centre, causing apoplexy among developers at home and abroad. They had invested considerable time and money in their efforts to secure the prize and, not unreasonably, felt that the Minister had no right to "pull the plug" at the last minute.
INSTEAD, Ballsbridge became the "preferred location" for the project at least partly because the RDS was a "public institution" and might therefore be expected to qualify for an even higher level of aid from the European Union.
It didn't seem to matter to Bord Failte or the Department of Tourism and Trade that there was already a convention centre project, with full planning permission from Dublin Corporation, for the Carlton site in O'Connell Street. However, such is the prejudice against the north side of the city - and Ireland's main street in particular - that it was never seen as a serious runner.
The prospective developers of this project also felt short changed and made a formal complaint to the European Commission, which has begun an investigation into how the matter was handled by the Irish authorities.
Sources say the Commission is quite sceptical about the convention centre project. Since one of the prime justifications for it was that it would help to boost Irish tourism revenue and since, mirabile dictu, the tourism industry here has grown by leaps and bounds without it, the view now taken by some senior officials in Brussels is that there is no longer a need for the EU to provide any assistance at all for a national convention centre in Dublin.
In any case, the very idea of shovelling a convention centre into the RDS must be challenged - and not just because it would compromise the unique Edwardian ambience of the society's showgrounds.
THE truth is that Ballsbridge needs it like a hole in the head. If one looks at the whole thrust of urban renewal in Dublin, the subtext of it all has been to pull the city's centre of gravity back from its relentless drift towards Ballsbridge.
If the inner city was littered with derelict sites, as indeed it was in the mid1980s, the main reason lay in developers putting all their eggs into the "Dublin 4" basket.
In this context, building a convention centre makes sense only if it is used as an anchor for urban renewal. Such a flagship project would do wonders for O'Connell Street, which desperately needs a lift.
But if it proves impossible to overcome the prejudice among decision makers against our principal thoroughfare, then surely the next best things would be to locate it in the docklands? After all, the master plan - now due to be published by the end of this month - for this quite vast area of 1,300 acres will hinge on finding viable "national and international" flagship projects to anchor its development.
There is no valid reason why a multi purpose venue, serving the arts as well as conventions, could not be built in the docklands. There is even an ideal site for it - CIE's freight marshalling yards on the North Wall.
These yards, occupying a land area of some 40 acres, are likely to become redundant if the £100 million plus plan to build a national freight distribution centre in Clondalkin goes ahead, with a rail link to Dublin Port.
Belfast's Waterfront Hall shows what can be done. Infinitely flexible, it can be used during the daytime to accommodate - and feed - conferences of up to 2,200 participants and, at night, for the Bolshoi Ballet or a symphony concert by the Ulster Orchestra. It would even be possible to pull out all the seats in the stalls and put in a boxing ring for Wayne McCullough's next title fight.
Equally, the hall could provide a more than adequate venue for the Royal Shakespeare Company - something Dublin cannot do at present. As Patricia Quinn, director of the Arts Council, put it, "flexibility is the name of the game."
The more flexible a venue is, the more it can pay its way without having to rely on endless annual subsidies. She envisages that the proposed centre for the performing arts would be used between a half and two thirds of the time for arts purposes, which means that it could easily cater for conventioneers as well. They attend conventions only to have a good time and Dublin, in its current Barcelona phase, seems well geared to offer that to them. But what wouldn't we have been able to do if the 2,500 seat Theatre Royal had survived the demolition ball? {CORRECTION} 97040200008