Costing an official four million Euros (I suspect more), the Spire might seem a touch extravagant. Criticism of it - much muted, since it has become a popular success - tends to be of the impoverished "how many hospital beds could we get for that kind of money" variety. As if there was no place for uplift in human life, only grim utilitarian endeavour. But as it happens, the Spire is not just an isolated object, but the first part of a regeneration strategy for the whole of O'Connell Street, which has become shabby and run-down in exactly the same way as Princes Street in Edinburgh. This is where you are dumped when you arrive in from the airport, and an unedifying, often smokily gridlocked kind of place it is. The spire - which rises from a 23-foot diameter bronze disc set in the ground, and which tapers very gradually from about ten feet wide at the base to six inches near the top - will eventually command a street with more space given over to pedestrians, and less to motor traffic. The long-term aim is to make it completely car-free, but that depends on various other plans to get vehicles out of the centre, including the building of a new city tram system, now under way. Whatever the politics of that, what is not in doubt is that O'Connell Street and its tributaries are jam-packed with people on foot who could do with a better deal. In that respect it is like so many other city centres- like Trafalgar Square, even, where the car has finally been tamed, though not removed.