The contrast with somewhere like the Champs Elysees in Paris was stark: it was the difference between a street that had been cherished by its people . . . and by the politicians they entrusted to look after it . . .

and one that had been left to find its own level of decay.

A few years ago, somebody shouted stop and the O'Connell Street redevelopment programme was put into place. So far, in terms of projects completed, this has meant the erection of a big steel spire, the felling of some old trees and the creation of footpaths, which have since been destroyed by discarded chewing gum.

Years after the refurbishment programme commenced, O'Connell Street is a giant building site, pockmarked with potholes and broken concrete, laid waste by building materials, polluted by the fumes of a thousand traffic jams. It will be finished one day, but already you can see what it is going to become: a street with a big steel spire and even more footpaths destroyed by chewing gum.

And when it's finished, or shortly thereafter, it will be dug up again, to facilitate the proposed new Metro. Or maybe it's an extension to the Luas I'm thinking of.

Either way, the diggers and the building materials will return. And once again, O'Connell Street will shine as a symbol of neglect, this time of the capital's public transport requirements, which can be dealt with only by reducing the 'main thoroughfare' to a mountain of rubble.

Dublin City Council spokespeople have described as ridiculous suggestions that the state of O'Connell Street contributed to last weekend's rioting. And up to a point, they are correct:

although the street can provoke feelings of great anger in pedestrians trying to negotiate its footpaths, or in commuters stuck on stationary buses, it wasn't that kind of frustration which sparked off the rioting.

But to the extent that the O'Connell Street riots were the result of neglect by government and by local authorities in a wide range of different areas, its current state of dilapidation can be said to be a factor in what happened. The neglect of the street, and the slow and painful efforts to deal with that, provided many of the missiles which rioters pelted at gardai. And the continuing neglect of An Garda Siochana meant that those rioters were faced with young men and women in uniform who had no more ability to deal with a riot than you or I.

That they coped bravely with the provocation says something about their personal courage; that they were so obviously unqualified to stop that provocation happening in the first place was a consequence of official neglect of a force which has too many people stationed in areas where they are not needed, and too few in potential trouble spots.

The presence of almost as many gardai to protect a preening President Bush in Co Clare on Wednesday morning than were available on O'Connell Street last Saturday highlighted the poverty of decision-making and strategy at management levels of An Garda Siochana.

Left to its own devices for decades, the force is clearly unable to deal with the big challenges of policing in this fledgling century. When it could have done with attention, it was ignored;

when it would have welcomed direction, it was neglected.

The issue of the neglect of the people who actually rioted is a trickier matter, because it steers very close to a traditional left-wing analysis, which would blame poverty and social exclusion for what happened last Saturday. While that might explain or excuse the riots in France before Christmas, it doesn't justify the Dublin disturbance, which was the work of young thugs tanked up on expensive beer, and clad in over-priced soccer shirts. Poor they weren't.

Neither can they be described as an underclass.

A better description might be limboclass, in which people exist outside the norms of regular society, but have by no means fallen off the edge. Mostly, they are working, they have money and have homes to go to but have chosen an existence which is alien to most of us, thuggish, violent, chronically wary of the state and all its agents, sceptical of any notion that they have any stake in society, or that society is worth their attention at all.

And for the most part, until they go on the kind of imbecilic rampage we saw last weekend, society gives them very little attention either. Which brings us back to the issue of neglect.

Because somebody chooses to opt out is not a reason to let them, or to ignore them when they do so. But this is what our politicians have done. For years . . . through many different governments . . . they have wasted opportunities to run Ireland in a manner that prioritises the needs of their citizens.

The chronic consequences are everywhere. Last Saturday, some of those consequences combined to pit a thuggish limboclass against an unprepared police force on a neglected street full of useful weapons.

Dublin burned as a result.

And if it happened once, it can happen again.