The Irish Times

After a grim past, Dublin's Cork Street, from Dolphin's Barn to the Coombe, is being sensitively redeveloped - although not all of the buildings are beautiful. Twenty years ago, Dublin's civic ambitions were so low that the planners could only envisage warehouses and brick walls lining the new roads that their engineering colleagues were driving through the heart of the city. Those days have gone, and in few places is this more evident than along Cork Street. Preyed upon by Dublin Corporation (as it then was) for more than 40 years, with all the resultant dereliction and decay, the widened street - originally intended as a dual-carriageway - is undergoing a transformation so staggering that long-term residents of the area must be reeling in shock at what's happening.