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dynamics also emerged including disputes over whether the responsibility for addressing housing need lay with Central or Local Government and the question of whether relationships between builders, landlords and politicians were conducive to or corrupting of good housing policy.

      The 1922 million pound fund led to the building of 2,000 public houses in urban areas such as Marino, Dublin. Modelled on the Garden City concept in vogue in Britain at the time the scheme sought to build good quality homes for artisan workers in steady employment. The standards were indeed high, as were the rents, excluding those in less secure or lower paid employment.

      The failure to invest in housing for the poor provoked criticism, not just from the opposition benches, but from the Government party as well. During an adjournment debate on housing in May 1923 the influential pro Treaty TD Walter L. Cole called for a major investment in public housing. He described the tenements as a ‘national scandal’ demanding that

      at the earliest possible moment we should clear them out and erase them from the face of the earth; and if we do not do so we deserve to be held in contempt by any people priding themselves on their civilisation.19

      His call went unheeded as the rural bias in housing policy continued. The same year saw the passing of the 1923 Land Act granting compulsory purchase powers to Councils to acquire and sell on land. The Act marked the end of a lengthy period of land reform and redistribution and benefited a further 114,000 tenants.

      Increased grants and rates relief were provided to those seeking to build private homes in the Housing Act of 1924 giving particular priority to those building larger houses. These supports were extended to building cooperatives known as Public Utility Societies the following year.

      Further assistance was made available in a third Housing Act in 1929 through the extension of a Central Government loan fund to provide mortgages under the Small Dwellings Acquisitions scheme while rates relief was made mandatory for all new homeowners.

      The 1926 census estimated that there were as many as 800,000 people living in overcrowded accommodation. As a result, infant mortality in working-class neighbourhoods was three times that in middle-class areas and 4,500 people were losing their lives to TB every year.20 The Department of Local Government estimated that the State needed 43,656 homes, yet despite the various initiatives output remained low.

      The combined consequence of these measures over the decade was a total public investment of £2.58 million in house construction of which £1.07 million went to private individuals. By 1932 Local Authorities had provided an additional 10,000 homes while private builders had delivered 16,500. In Dublin City, where need for Council housing was highest, the Local Authority provided a meagre 483 units a year over the decade. According to O’Connell, ‘two thirds of all houses built with State aid were in private ownership’.21

      However, as with the housing funded under the million pound scheme, both the rural and urban housing funded through the various housing acts of the 1920s benefited small farmers and the artisan working class. The State’s first Taoiseach, W.T. Cosgrave, made clear that Government had no intention of seeking to address the housing problems of the poorest in society. He told a Dáil debate in 1925 that doing so would require the provision of 70,000 homes at a cost of £14 million. A cost he clearly felt was prohibitive.22

      Despite the fact that tens of thousands of families continued to live in the most appalling conditions in the cities and towns it would not be until the 1930s that social action and civic concern would force the political system to act.

      The 1920s did, however, generate one of the first sustained debates about the issue of town planning and whether the solution to the poor housing conditions in the urban centres lay in the building of new suburbs. Civic surveys for Cork and Dublin were published in 1922 and 1923. The Dublin report described the housing situation is Dublin as a ‘tragedy’, stating:

      Its conditions cause either a rapid or slow death. Rapid when the houses fall upon the tenants, as has already happened, slow when they remain standing dens of insanitation.23

      The survey warned that the tenements were at risk of spreading and urged the rehousing of 60,000 people to new housing developments in the suburbs. O’Connell notes that the survey’s findings were strongly supported by the officials in Dublin Corporation but that political support was less than forthcoming.

      Cumann an nGaedhael TD John Good summed up the thinking of Government at the time when he argued that

      housing is an economic problem which could only be solved by putting it on an economic basis … we must learn in the Free State to rely more on ourselves and less on the Government and to try and earn what we want by honest work.24

      In what was to become an almost universal myopia in successive Government thinking, exchequer subsidies were acceptable and supplied in great volume where housing was to be provided for private ownership but the call for similar subsidies to lift society’s poorest families from the most appalling living conditions was seemingly unthinkable.

      O’Connell concludes that

      the thrust of housing legislation throughout the 1920’s had only a marginal effect on alleviating the dire living conditions of the poorest urban households. The greatest benefits accrued to the middle class and better off working class households whose incomes allowed them to avail of the subsidies contained in the various housing acts of the new Irish state.25

      This was a far cry from the founding policy document of the Irish Republic, the 1919 Democratic Programme. One of the very first acts of the newly established First Dáil was to assert that it shall

      be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provisions for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children to ensure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter …26

      The gap between the rhetoric and reality of the new Republic was to become the key battle ground in the general election that brought Cumann an nGaedhael’s first decade in power to an end in 1931. It would also be the measure against which working-class communities and their trade union and political representatives would judge the new Fianna Fáil Government of Éamon de Valera.

      The final years of W.T. Cosgrave’s Government were marked by growing social unrest, in part fuelled by the failure of his administration to address the social and economic needs of large sections of society. Fianna Fáil’s entry to Government in 1931, assisted by a more assertive Labour Party and grass roots campaigning by radical republicans, was as much on a promise of addressing the issues of unemployment and poor housing as it was on broader constitutional issues such as partition. Indeed, leading radicals within the party such as Constance Markievicz urged their colleagues to ensure that politics ‘was more about the organisation of food, clothing and housing’ than which leader to mobilise under.27

      While the final Housing Act of Cumann na nGaedhael in 1931, provoked by a particularly damning Dublin Corporation Housing report of the same year, finally opened the way for subsidies to provide housing for lower-income families, it was the first housing act of the new Fianna Fáil Government that made such developments genuinely viable.

      The 1932 Act provided additional funds to Local Authorities to offset the loan costs of rehousing those cleared from slums or for lower-income urban or rural workers. The new facility meant that rents could be sent at a less than economic cost enabling lower-income families access to housing.

      The legislation still prioritised development by private individuals and Public Utility Societies and as with its predecessors was more focused on rural labourers than their urban counterparts. Over the following eight years 17,525 cottages were provided for rural labourers, despite only 10,000 being required. Meanwhile less than half the 19,000 urban dwellings required in Dublin were built.28 In total 99,000 homes were provided under the terms of the act with 56,000 in private ownership.29

      The increasing reliance on private loan finance started to encounter problems as Irish banks, operating as a cartel, increasingly set prohibitive interest rates. In response Government expanded the availability of their Local Loans Fund to cover housing,

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