"And she was still late, " adds Joe with a wry smile.

As the merits of a convenient-to-city address are discussed, Emer gets her own back with a stage cough when Joe says he often takes the 30-minute stroll along the quays to the Dail.

Close proximity to the centre, whether for driving or walking, was undoubtedly a priority when they bought the late Victorian house in l997, both for Joe's north inner city constituency work as a Labour Party TD and for Emer's role as a Dublin city councillor and her work as programme manager with Leargas.

The couple, who have been together since l990, have just moved back in after a major renovation of the centuryold house, which includes a kitchen extension filled with light and opening onto a west-facing patio garden.

Honorary Dubs . . . Emer is from Dundalk, Joe is from Sligo . . . the two agreed they had found a period gem, albeit with work to be done, when they first viewed the house eight years ago.

A sense of history was a plus, as Joe explains that the house is in the old area of Oxmantown, formerly called Ostman's Town, from the time the Vikings were banished to there from Wood Quay after the Battle of Clontarf.

Great Danes are all very well, of course. Emer's househunting concerns at the time were more centred on great space.

"We had looked at so many houses, but I immediately got a different feeling from this, " she recalls.

"It was something to do with the amount of space, the well-proportioned rooms and high ceilings. I got here for the viewing just before Joe, and when he arrived his reaction was that this was simply a great house that didn't need any work at all.

"I knew it needed help, but wasn't quite sure what exactly. We both loved it and moved in more or less straight away. In retrospect, it was a good idea to live in it for a while and to figure out what we wanted."

We chat about the merits of hiring an architect, and also what Emer has learnt about the long, dusty and laborious task of renovating an old house.

"The best piece of advice our architect gave us was never to get into a discussion with the builder about anything to do with the work.

He project-managed the whole thing and that meant I didn't have to worry about organising different aspects of the work and if I wasn't happy with something, he would take care of it. If you're still friends with your architect at the end of a project, that's a good sign. And we still are, by the way."

The only thing she would have reservations about, if, perish the thought, it all had to be done again, was the choice (hers) of natural stone tiles for the hall and kitchen floors.

Too hard to keep clean?

"They just looked grubby from the start. We had an expert from the tile company who came out, shook his head, and said, 'Ah yes, your builder has made a bit of a mess.'

"But the marks, as the builder eventually pointed out, were not bits of dirt, but fossils due to the natural quality of the stone. I like them, but still can't help pointing out the 'fossils' to visitors and making excuses."

As Emer shows us around, the phone rings several times with requests from a local radio station.

They want her to comment on remarks made in the council offices about the 54m being paid to consultants regarding the Port Tunnel and also suspected leaks in the structure.

And leaks are something on which the couple are something of an authority.

They hadn't moved into their own house long before the condition of the roof on the original kitchen extension came to their attention.

Particularly every time there was a downpour.

"It was the typical old-style flat roof extension in rag order. The strategically placed buckets didn't exactly create a great impression when friends called round.

"It took us a while to come round to the decision of hiring an architect, and the project was so massive . . .

involving moving the staircase to one side of the hall to the other . . . that we had to move out for about seven months altogether.

"It must have shown how committed we are to the house, because one friend who was surprised at the scale of the work said to me, with raised eyebrows, 'So, you're really staying here then?'" The couple are used to similar remarks, recalling when Joe used to live in Sean McDermott Street, right in the inner city, and colleagues were reluctant to visit.

"For years, no one was prepared to leave cars outside the house, " he says. "I used to have the entire street to myself. Imagine that, being able to park in the heart of the city? Now it's a different story . . . you're lucky to get any space at all."

He is referring to Dublin city council's Integrated Area Plan for the northeast inner city and which has now begun to make a significant impact with the creation of a better mix of both private and social housing a major part of the drive.

Their own stomping ground of Dublin 7 is also set to change radically with a number of massive redevelopments over the next few years.

There's the new shopping centre for Phibsborough, which has just got the planning green light, the relocation of Mountjoy prison, and, even closer to the couple's home, the redevelopment of both the run-down O'Devaney Gardens and the former Grangegorman psychiatric institution.

Emer is on the O'Devaney Regeneration Board, a group which involves a broader number of interests than just solely the developers, she explains.

The two see both of these major projects as positive for the area, whilst being critical of other property development in the city as being 'purely market driven'.

"There are high-rise apartment developments that have been built purely for enterprise and profit.

"In Smithfield, for example, they're tax incentive driven, bought by people who are never going to live there, but solely for rental income.

It's difficult to create that sense of community, or see what the real gain is for an area, " says Joe.

"With the multi-million O'Devaney Gardens project of new housing, the plan is to mix both social and private.

It will be a huge benefit to first-time buyers, and for people who want to remain in the area."

With so much going on around them, and such workfilled days . . . and evenings . . .the couple's next Big Plan in terms of their own nestbuilding simply involves buying a comfy new sofa . . . half of their furniture is in the garage while the remainder had to be thrown out during the renovation and building work.

"We're both big Sudoku addicts, so spare moments at home sees either one of us with the head buried in the paper, and usually at the big kitchen table where everyone congregates" says Emer.

"But I'm determined to finish off one of the other rooms.

The 'tv room' at the front of the house currently only has a big plasma screen, a huge bean bag and a series of pictures propped against the wall waiting to be re-hung.

"So the next big purchase is definitely a sofa. Somewhere to flop down onto on Saturday nights, sounds like home, doesn't it?"