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Landless labourers benefited little if at all from this massive redistribution. While their numbers declined by more than half during the final decades of the nineteenth century, they remained a significant presence in rural Ireland. However, their campaigning demands were more often than not for better wages rather than improved housing and their future in many instances lay in migration into the towns and cities. And it was here that the real inequalities in housing conditions were to be found.
Urban Housing
Cathal O’Connell notes that an 1861 Dublin Corporation report found a third of all houses within the city boundary were tenements.9 Fifty thousand people lived in just 8,000 dwellings in ‘fetid and poisonous conditions’. A flood of destitute migrants from the countryside followed the years of famine as Cork, Limerick and smaller towns saw their populations swell.
The immediate response was the public inquiry where Government bodies or philanthropic societies studied the conditions of the urban poor: 1865 saw the creation of Dublin Corporation’s Public Health Committee with its first report published the following year; 1880 saw the publication of the Commission of Inquiry into sewage and drainage in Dublin, with a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Working Class Housing five years later; 1900 saw a report on high mortality rates in Dublin with a second report on the same subject six years later.
The 1885 Royal Commission found 32,000 families living in just 7,200 houses in Dublin. Almost 60 percent of the city’s population was living in tenements. Meanwhile 22,000 people were crammed into 1,731 tenement buildings in Cork.
This substantial body of evidence confirmed time and again the squalid conditions of the urban working class. Chronic overcrowding, debilitating poverty, disease and high adult and infant mortality were widespread. Private landlords, driven by greed, had no qualms about putting their tenants’ lives, let alone health and safety, at risk.
In response, Government passed the Labouring Classes (Lodging Houses and Dwellings) Act in 1866 providing loans to cover half the cost of providing housing for the poor. Take up was limited. Some philanthropic societies and private companies did enter the fray. The Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company was founded in 1876 by prominent businesspeople to house the poor. Through a mixture of private loans and State subsidies it provided 3,600 homes.10
Other prominent providers included the Industrial Tenements Company, the Peabody Trust, the Guinness Trust and the Sutton Housing Trust. While some were purely commercial enterprises others had a social reforming zeal. The Iveagh Trust, which still houses social tenants in Dublin’s Liberties today, is possibly the best known of these, combining housing with baths, markets and social activities for children focused on educational and moral improvement.
In the main, however, output was low and the housing was aimed at better-paid artisans rather than the worst off of the urban poor. By 1908 just 5,000 urban dwellings had been provided. The tenement problem in Dublin at the start of the twentieth century was considerably worse than other cities. An estimated 36 percent of families were living in single rooms in the capital compared to 15 percent in London and just 1 percent in Cork and Belfast.11 The result was that Dublin had the highest infant mortality rate in Britain and Ireland as half of the city’s population continued to live in insanitary and overcrowded tenements.12
According to Diarmaid Ferriter, in 1911 ‘66% of Dublin’s working-class population of 128,000 were deemed to be living in substandard housing’ while 118,000 people were crammed into 5,000 tenement buildings.13
As with the rural poor, housing conditions in urban Ireland only began to change when anger turned into protest. Public awareness of the plight of the urban poor was raised following the launch of a new social policy periodical Studies in 1912 which devoted significant space to covering the housing issue. The collapse of two tenement buildings in Church Street, central Dublin in 1913, killing seven people, provoked widespread anger. Set against the backdrop of rising trade union militancy during the Lockout of the same year it was only a matter of time before organised labour focused its attention on the housing conditions of working people.
During the 1914 local elections the Labour Party in Dublin campaigned under the slogan ‘Vote for Labour, Sweep away the Slums’.14 In the same year the Irish Trades Union Congress passed a motion demanding ‘legislation to secure … the building of healthy homes for all’.15
The result of all of this awareness raising and agitation was the setting up of the Dublin Housing Inquiry which criticised some property-owning members of the Corporation for displaying ‘little sense of their responsibilities as landlords’. The report found that 60,000 people were in immediate need of housing and recommended the provision of 100 percent loans to fund urban housing for the poor and the conversion of tenements into proper accommodation.
Demonstrating the prevailing pro landlord attitude in some circles at the time Ferriter, commenting on a 1917 article in Studies by a medical doctor dealing with the relationship between poor health and bad housing, notes that
It was revealing that he [the author] believed many would see as ‘revolutionary’ the suggestion that no person should be allowed to derive profit from a house unless the house was in good sanitary condition and in good habitable repair.16
A needs assessment carried out under the terms of The Housing (Ireland) Act 1919 estimated a requirement of 61,648 houses for the urban working class. Local Authorities submitted proposals to provide 42,000 of these to be delivered by 1922.
But the War of Independence and Civil War intervened and the plans were never realised. The challenge of addressing the housing needs of the urban working classes would have to wait until after partition and the creation of two separate States on the island of Ireland.17
Why was the Land League more successful at securing improvements in rural Ireland than their urban counterparts in the labour movement?
The obvious answer is that Ireland was still a predominantly rural country with a majority of the population and thus political power resting outside of the larger cities.
In addition to this, the Land League was more intimately connected with the struggle, first for Home Rule and later for Independence, in a way that the labour movement was not. The relatively apolitical nature of craft unionism at the end of the nineteenth century, before the arrival of the more radical general unions, left organised labour at a distance from the national movement.
The strength of Belfast-based municipal socialism and its ties to both Unionist politics and the British labour movement divided the trade union movement during these crucial years, further weakening its strength both with the emerging nationalist political class in Westminster and with the predominant landlord interests that were to lead Northern Unionism post-partition.
Urban Ireland, north and south, would have to wait some decades before the State would start to respond to its housing needs as it had done for rural Ireland.
Free State – The First Decade
Fiscal conservatism and a reluctance to intervene to address acute housing need was to dominate the newly established Government in Dublin post-partition. Richard Mulcahy, the Minister for Local Government, made his views clear when in 1929 he told Dáil Éireann that ‘the State cannot bear on its shoulders the burden of solving this particular problem’. While his Ministerial colleague Patrick McGilligan was more blunt stating that ‘people may have to die in this country and die of starvation’.18
Despite the widespread housing need across the country and in particular the appalling conditions in urban housing in Dublin, Cork and other urban centres, the Government seemed unwilling or unable to tackle the problem.
The politics of housing in the new Free State from 1922 to 1931 was dominated by the same priorities as pre-independence. Rural housing took precedence over urban provision. Subsidies for private homeownership outstripped the provision of publicly owned accommodation. Meanwhile ongoing concern about the poor quality of life in tenement slums failed to provoke a significant State response.