to City Arts Centre when the organisation occupied a warehouse building on Moss Street near Tara Street Station, then the largest centre of its kind in Ireland. U2 provided fully equipped rehearsal spaces for young bands in the basement. Over this was a cafe and theatre space initially run by Declan Gorman and above that a gallery space initially run by Tommy Weir. Sandy Fitzgerald continued as Director through to 2001. The Arts Council never fully backed the centre favouring the highly regarded Project Arts Centre, despite the City Arts Centre clear leadership profile for community arts. The Centre actually owned this building, having bought it in a then run-down area. However, the property become rather valuable. There was an opportunity to create a large civic project, when a partnership between City Quay School to the rear of the centre and a community hall adjacent to the centre were brought into a scheme for an innovative socio/cultural project at the entrance to the docklands, then at the beginning of its transformation. The scheme needed a piece of vacant land that linked all the properties but Dublin Dockland Development Authority rejected the idea, although both Dublin City Council and The Arts Council, plus all the local representatives supported the project. As a result, City Arts Centre became an anomaly within the dockland development. Sandy Fitzgerald stepped down as director of the centre in 2000, after 27 years. City Arts did not receiving Arts Council funding in 2001. Declan McGonagle was then hired as director and under his leadership the Centre began a process of cessation, starting with the closure of the Centre for 2 years with all staff made redundant and all activities stopped. City Councilor Mannix Flynn, on the closure of the City Arts Centre, said that “Dublin lost an arts community down there, the community lost an arts centre, lost employment”. McGonagle launched a 'Civil Arts Inquiry' (a two year series of "conferences and recorded public debates") meanwhile earning €50,000 per year. The 'Inquiry' had skeptics, dismissing it for not engaging with the art community and as a profit-driven waste of time, without producing any results. Under McGonagle the Centre's building and property on Moss St in central Dublin was sold in 2003 for more than €4.2 million, making it the richest arts organisation in Ireland at the time. After the sale, the City Arts Centre spent the next