The Irish Times

The most arresting revelation at last week's "New Housing 2001" conference was that only half-a-dozen two-storey terraced houses were built in Dublin city last year; apartments accounted for more than 90 per cent of total output - something that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago.The quality of what's being built now is light years ahead of the crude offerings of the early 1990s - all those gimcrack blocks with their long, narrow, artificially-lit corridors lined with single-aspect shoebox flats, often laid out around courtyards doubling as parking lots with token trees to take the bare look off the place