Home - Eoin Ó Broin

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mass social mobilisation and progressive parliamentary action.

      My central argument is that our housing system is this way because it was designed so. People in positions of power took advice and made decisions which resulted in the dysfunction all around us. Sometimes they did so with sincere and genuine intent. Other times they were incompetent, corrupt or greedy. But what matters is less why people made these decisions, more the impact those decisions had and continue to have on the lives of real people.

      The key features of our current housing system are an under-provision of public non-market housing and an over-reliance on the private market to meet housing need. This involves massive subsidies to landowners, developers, landlords and investment funds. It is based on a conception of housing as a commodity rather than a social necessity. It prioritises, whether intentionally or not, profit over need and as a consequence generates levels of housing inequality and poverty which are structural requisites rather than unintended consequences of the system.

      Any alternative functional housing system must reverse these trends and place the large-scale provision of public non-market housing at its very centre. Housing is too fundamental a need for human well-being to be left to the boom and bust cycle of the market.

      The book that follows attempts to make the argument, in as convincing a manner as possible, that at the core of our dysfunctional housing system is an over-reliance on the private market and thus the key ingredient to a stable, secure and affordable housing system is public housing.

      But slogans and sound bites are not enough. The people in need of safe, secure and affordable housing deserve more than that. They need a credible, costed and coherent alternative to our current dysfunctional housing system. One that can be implemented in the real world, that can secure the active endorsement of a majority of the people and that with the right kind of Government could start to be constructed from today.

      Somewhere between the sincerity of inadequate amelioration and the energy of impossibilist rupture lies a pathway to a functional housing system that guarantees all people a place they can call home. The book you are about to read tries to signpost that pathway and offer a glimpse, albeit sketchy, of the final destination.

      The formation of the Land League in 1879 marks the beginning of the social movement for modern housing in Ireland. It is no accident that Michael Davitt’s first-hand account of this turning point in our national history is titled The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland.

      The demands of this powerful national network of tenant farmers was to shape the State’s response to housing need in the decades that followed. In turn these changes, in both urban and rural Ireland, laid the foundations for the housing system that was to develop during the course of the twentieth century.

      Midway through the nineteenth century 80 percent of the population of Ireland lived in dwellings made of mud on land rented from landlords. Half of these comprised single-room huts with no windows in which families and animals lived, ate and slept together. The other half had more rooms and usually windows but could still only be described as basic.1

      The remaining 20 percent were divided between those living in farmhouses or small urban homes with more than five rooms and windows, and the very wealthy 2 percent of society who lived in absolute luxury whether in the big country houses or Georgian city homes.2

      The Great Hunger from 1845, between starvation and emigration, wiped out huge swathes of the rural population. In the decade up to 1851 the number of single room mud cabins fell by a dramatic 355,689 or 71 percent of the pre-famine total.3 Alongside the swelling numbers of people in graveyards and coffin ships, the famine saw a dramatic shift of people to the cities and towns.

      The intolerable conditions of the rural poor sparked decades of agrarian protest, first in the form of localised societies such as Whiteboys and Ribbonmen. Aggrieved at maltreatment by landlords and their agents these secret organisations took their revenge in the dead of night, maiming or driving cattle, damaging property or, worse still, taking life.

      The rage of rural Ireland found expression in the writings of radicals such as James Fintan Lalor during the 1840s, Charles Gavin Duffy’s Tenant Right League of the 1850s and the failed Fenian rebellion of 1867.

      But it was the Land League founded by former Fenian Michael Davitt with the support of leading nationalist politicians including Charles Stewart Parnell that galvanised these disparate expressions of discontent into a truly national movement.

      The league combined mass meetings, boycotts and rent strikes in its campaign to improve the lot of tenant farmers and ultimately to secure the abolition of landlordism. While opposed to violence, agrarian reprisals against landlords continued to form part of the backdrop of what was to become known as the Land War.

      The movement went beyond the calls for fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale, arguing that the land issue could only be finally resolved through widescale tenant proprietorship. This core demand became the focus of a four-year campaign during which the Land League opposed evictions and rent increases while attempting to secure legislative reform in Westminster.

      Concerned by the rising levels of political and social agitation, the British Government eventually responded with a series of land reforms which over the next decades redistributed huge tracts of rural Ireland from landlords to tenant farmers.

      The Kilmainham Treaty settlement between Parnell and Gladstone may have demobilised the movement and angered the radicals, Davitt included, but its outcome was to prove as important to the development of Irish society in the twentieth century as many of the better known historical events.

      While the 1870 Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act sought to quell the rising tide of rural protest, its measures were weak and outpaced by events. It was not until the 1881 Land Act that real reform got underway. In the two decades that followed, seven significant pieces of land legislation passed through Westminster.4

      The Land Act increased tenants’ security of tenure, established a Land Court to deal with disputes and fix rents for fifteen-year terms, and set up a Land Commission backed with loans to assist a tenant purchase scheme. This was followed by the 1882 Arrears of Rent (Ireland) Act which gave grants to 100,000 tenants to clear their arrears, a condition of access to both the Land Court and Commission.

      The year 1885 brought in the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act providing the equivalent of €5 million in long-term loans for tenant purchase with a second round of loans to the same value provided for in the 1887 Land Purchase Act. The 1891 Land Purchase Act provided the equivalent of a further €33 million in 100 percent loans followed in 1903 with another round of loans repayable over sixty-eight years. Compulsory acquisition powers were granted in the 1909 Land Act specifically to relieve congestion.

      Padraic Kenna notes that prior to the enactment of this raft of legislation ‘13,000 landlords owned and controlled the whole rural area of Ireland’ while by 1920 ‘316,000 holdings were purchased by tenants on some 11.5 million acres … Some 750,000 acres were also distributed to 35,000 allottees, and 10,000 holdings were created from intermixed or rundale lands, mainly through the Congested Districts Board.’5

      Alongside land reform, political pressure from the Land League and Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster forced the Government to introduce a series of Labourers Acts in 1883, 1885, 1891 and 1896. These provided loans for the provision of rural cottages for farmers. There were 16,000 such cottages constructed by 1900 with a total of 36,000 provided for by 1914. In many instances the State subsidised the loans used by labourers to purchase these dwellings by as much as 36 percent.6

      The legacy of the Land League was to transform land ownership in Ireland to such an extent that half a million rural families became private land- and homeowners. It undoubtedly improved the quality of life for those involved, giving them permanent security of tenure over their homes and farming livelihoods. In the 1840s just 17 percent of tenant farmers lived in houses with five or more rooms. By 1901 the number

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