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Movement 1

The State Gets Involved

Modern Housing

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.

Land Reform and Rural Housing

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 had increased to a dramatic 56 percent.7 By 1911 just 1 percent of tenant farmers lived in what was then classified as fourth class dwellings.8 However, inequalities in access to secure and affordable accommodation persisted.

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.

However, new 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.

New Government, Similar Policy

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, though neither Cork nor Dublin cities were eligible despite having the greatest need.

One of the immediate consequences of the freeing up of credit was to see the number of Small Dwelling Acquisitions Scheme builds and purchases dramatically increase. In the scheme’s first four decades 2,102 mortgages were issued. In the following decade 4,648 homes were purchased with the loan.

While Fianna Fáil made much of what they called their ‘Housing Drive’ others were less than convinced. Housing activism, led by the Republic Congress, the Communist Party and others gathered pace throughout the 1930s. A series of proposed evictions for rent arrears in Council housing in Dublin provoked widespread anger and the formation of the Municipal Tenants Association. Rent arrears and consequent rent strikes once again highlighted the problem that economic rents, set to allow Local Authorities to repay their loans, were too high for low-income families, especially when faced with economic downturns.

There was also growing disquiet at the emerging relationship between building contractors and the new Fianna Fáil Government. J.J. Lee notes that

The housing programme naturally provided grist to the pockets of the contractors. Fortunes were made in the field more easily than manufacturing. The building industry soon came to be widely regarded as an extension of the Fianna Fáil patronage system.30

Though Lee did acknowledge that, irrespective of the motivations behind the building expansion, ‘the new dwellings were a marked improvement on the foul slums that for so long had disgraced Dublin and other cities’.31

Notwithstanding these concerns, output of Government-funded housing significantly increased during the 1930s. In the decade from 1932 an average of 12,000 houses were built annually of which half were Council homes, compared to an average of just 2,000 per year under the previous administration. However, from the early 1940s this dropped off significantly as fiscal constraints and the disruption to the supply of building materials caused by the Second World War impacted on house building.

Nevertheless, even with the increased output the new Government’s policy was remarkably similar to their predecessor’s. Private homeownership was prioritised over public housing while the latter predominantly favoured better-off workers and the middle class.

While in part this reflected the financial constraints of the time, it was also based on a deep-seated prejudice towards those trapped in poverty.

During a revealing debate on slum clearance in 1931 the then Minister for Supplies Seán Lemass told the Dáil that

The ratepayer who has to pay for slum clearance and re-housing is sceptical of the use of helping the slum dweller … [they] will tell you that money spent on slum clearance and re-housing the slum dweller is largely wasted.

Lemass went on to argue that the best way to ‘counteract that argument’ is to ‘show that a person who has lived all his life in the slums is capable of being taught how to care for property’. The future Taoiseach urged the use of ‘instructors and other people capable of educating and training’ slum dwellers when they move into new homes, a practice apparently used in ‘certain English cities’. Though Lemass wondered ‘whether that system would be suitable to the Irish character’.32

However, Lemass, better than most, fully understood the need for Fianna Fáil to drive a wedge between urban working-class voters and both the Labour Party and more radical social activism. Thus while their housing policy didn’t depart in substance from their predecessor’s, its quantity was certainly higher as evidenced by the increase in social spending from £8 million in 1929 to £12.6 million by 1939.33

In what was to become a regular feature of all subsequent Governments, significant disagreements emerged during the 1930s between the Minister and Department for Finance on the one hand and high-spending Departments such as Local Government on the other. While de Valera erred on the side of electoral caution during the 1930s the balance started to swing in Finance’s direction in the following decade.

But like Cumann na nGaedhael before them much of the focus remained on private ownership. Within a year of taking office Fianna Fáil almost doubled the subsidy for cottage building to 60 percent of the value of the Council loan repayments.34

The 1930s also saw the emergence of questionable building practices as Local Authorities, under pressure to deliver new homes, reduced standards in a practice known at the time as ‘skinning down’. The 1932 legislation provided subsidies to the Councils on a per unit basis creating a perverse incentive to produce a greater number of units at a lower cost.

The consequences were soon felt by tenants who discovered that their new homes were not built to an adequate standard. The longer-term legacy for Councils were only to be discovered when future generations had to bear the cost of substantial regeneration. Despite strong criticism at the time from the Dublin City Housing Architect, the practice was widespread.

While such ‘innovations’ were clearly not welcome developments, other more positive policy ideas did emerge during the 1930s. In response to the problem of whether to charge lower-income tenants economic rents or affordable rents the manager of Cork City Council Philip Monaghan introduced a system of rents as a percentage of family income. What became known as differential rent was eventually applied across all Local Authorities and remains in place today.

Despite the increased output, need, particularly in cities and towns, remained high. The Emergency brought new construction to dangerously low levels. The Dublin Housing Inquiry published in 1943 estimated that an additional 43,000 new dwellings were needed to replace the tenements in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford.

However, unlike the post-war Government in Westminster and its ambitious plans for substantial public investment in health and housing under the socialist Minister Aneurin Bevan, there was no post-war optimism in evidence in the Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government Seán MacEntee.

Indeed, as need continued to increase output continued to decline, reaching an all-time low in 1946 when just 563 houses were built.

Fianna Fáil’s failure to tackle the urban housing crisis was one of the key reasons for its fall from office. The emerging electoral threat of the new left republican party Clann na Poblachta was grounded in a growing disenchantment at the failure of the Free State after twenty-five years to improve the standard of living of a significant number of the urban and rural working class.

A Reforming Coalition

Despite his attempt to thwart the rise of Clann na Poblachta by calling a snap election in February 1948 Éamon de Valera was unable to stop the formation of the Free State’s first coalition Government, bringing his seventeen-year run as Taoiseach to an end. The new Government was an incongruous collection of Fine Gael, two Labour parties, Clann na Poblachta and a small farmers’ party.

However, despite its eclectic nature it had a reforming zeal which brought some of the post-war State interventionism gathering pace in Britain and Europe to bear on areas of policy including health and housing.

In housing this was led by Labour Minister Timothy Murphy until his unexpected death in 1949; he was then replaced by his party colleague Michael Keyes. Murphy not only significantly increased the targets for housing output for the coming years but exerted significant pressure on the banks to increase lending into the construction sector and delivered a tenfold increase in output within four years.35 He was also assisted by the availability of funding from the Marshall Aid Programme.

The 1946 census reported that there were 310,265 houses without any sanitation and 80,000 people were still living in single-room dwellings with 23,000 in Dublin.36

The first significant development on the housing front was the 1948 White Paper which reviewed policy to date and attempted to set out a longer-term plan to deal with both current and future demand. Important considerations such a migration, population change, property obsolescence, overcrowding and the need to raise accommodation standards were central to its considerations.

The White Paper estimated that the State needed 100,000 new homes over the next decade and argued that 60 percent of these should be public. To achieve this ambitious target the report recommended a range of changes to the existing regime of subsidies including halving the interest rate of the Local Loans Fund, extending the repaying period from 25 to 50 years and the provision of lump sum grants to Councils.

The subsequent 1948 Housing Act also increased the maximum market value of houses to be purchased under the Small Dwellings Scheme, increased home buyer grants and introduced a new supplementary grant for lower-income home buyers.

The results of these measures were significant with both social and private housing output increasing over the following ten years. Keogh notes that ‘in a spirit of new age optimism’ Government’s capital expenditure increased to £120 million including £6 million of borrowing the bulk of which was to fund houses and hospitals.37 Social housing output doubled from the 1940s to the 1950s from 20,768 houses in the first decade to 52,500 in the second while private output increased from 37,164 during the 40s to 49,188 in the 50s.38

While housing output increased significantly, the ratio of social to private housing shifted dramatically in favour of the latter from the early 1960s with just 29,124 social units delivered in that decade compared with 64,835 private homes. Kenna confirms that despite the significant increase in Council house provision, Government subsidies still benefited the private home buyer more than the social renting tenant:

In the 16 years from April 1948, about 137,000 dwellings were built with State aid, of which 74,000 were provided by private enterprise and 63,000 by local authorities. Capital expenditure in the period 1948 to 1964 on housing was estimated at £225m. Of which State aid and local authorities contributed £192m.39

Significantly just 15 percent of total capital invested in housing during this period came from non-State sources demonstrating the extent to which the vast majority of housing, including private homeownership, relied on non-market sources for funding.

Michelle Norris notes that the ‘take-up of central government house purchase and reconstruction grants increased from 2,157 in 1948/1949 to 17,544 in 1963/1964. This reflects the fact that, contrary to the 1948 White Paper’s expectations, ‘70% of dwellings constructed during the 1960s were provided by the private sector primarily for owner-occupation.’40

The short-lived 14th Dáil brought Fianna Fáil back to power for three years during which investment in and output of housing was scaled back by the fiscally orthodox Minister Seán McEntee and his officials at the Department of Finance.

However, with the return of the coalition Government in 1954 the expansion of house building was resumed well into the 1960s. As increased supply addressed much of the acute housing need, it also led to renewed concerns about the absence of adequate planning as new estates provided homes but not necessarily with the necessary social and economic infrastructure to meet the needs of communities. Concerns also continued regarding the growing economic and political significance of the construction industry and its relationship to Fianna Fáil who were back in Government from 1957 for a straight eleven-year run.

As the 1950s were coming to a close a new source of opposition to continued expenditure on housing emerged. Thomas Whitaker’s 1958 First Programme for Economic Expansion argued strongly for a shift in public expenditure from social to productive sectors of the economy.41 Housing constituted the single largest area of social expenditure through capital funds, loans and tax reliefs. While little understood at the time, this prioritising of ‘productive’ over ‘social’ investment and the negative social costs that come with it, was to have a profound impact on Government thinking for decades to come.

In 1962 Dublin Corporation has almost 9,000 households on their waiting lists with almost half of these deemed to have an immediate need. In the same year just 1,035 new council homes were under construction.42

While house building continued to increase, slum conditions remained a reality for many as highlighted by the death of four people including two children in 1963 when two tenement buildings collapsed within a fortnight in June, first in Bolton Street and then Fenian Street, only a short walk from Dáil Éireann and Government Buildings. The Dublin Housing Action Campaign was formed in response to the tragedy demanding the demolition of the tenements and the provision of safe and adequate housing.

A second Housing White Paper was published in 1964 and estimated that 50,000 new homes were needed immediately to meet existing demand. The paper also projected a need for a further 98,000 homes up to 1970, 50 percent of which were to be provided by Local Authorities. This would require the largest output of housing in the history of the State at 14,000 units per year.

In the same year officials and elected members from Dublin Corporation visited Paris, Copenhagen and Stockholm to examine how new building technologies, including system built concrete apartments, could be used to meet housing need at home. The trip was important as it not only secured a commitment to deliver an additional 1,000 homes a year over the next three years but was also seminal in the future use of high-rise housing developments.43

The 1964 White Paper was quickly followed by the 1966 Housing Act which consolidated all of the existing housing legislation of the preceding half a century into a single piece of law. In addition to providing further incentives to private homeownership, including the provision of low-cost sites for self-builders, it also extended the right of purchase to all Local Authority tenants. The results were quite dramatic.

Despite only becoming available in the second half of the decade Local Authorities sold 64,490 Council homes by 1969, more than double the output of social homes in the same decade. Significant discounts of up to 30 percent for urban purchasers and 45 percent for rural purchasers were available, determined by the length of time in the tenancy.

In response to demands for a more planned approach to housing output the Government introduced a requirement on Councils to produce development plans via the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1963. Combined with the 1968 Buchanan Report new suburban population centres in Tallaght, Clondalkin, Lucan and Blanchardstown were proposed. Forty years after it was first suggested, suburbanisation was to become official Government policy.

This newfound optimism was evident in the zeal with which the Minister for the Environment Neil Blaney belatedly embraced the post-war ambition of his British counterparts. A new National Building Agency with significant funds at its disposal was set to work with Local Authorities to deliver the largest scale housing projects in the history of the State, best exemplified by the proposed 3,000-home development in Ballymun at a cost of more than £9 million and the 1,000-home suburban development in Moy Ross in Limerick.

But Government hubris – as evidenced in the naming of the Ballymun towers after the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation – was not matched by long-term investment. The peripheral location of the larger developments combined with lack of amenities and poor allocation and estate management policies were to turn these iconic projects of the late 1960s into notorious examples of poor housing policy by the 1990s.

Social Housing’s High Point

The 1970s witnessed the largest output of housing in the history of the State with 61,953 social and 176,230 private homes built. However, with the massive transfer of stock from the public to the private sector via tenant purchase the overall balance in favour of homeownership continued to prevail.

Private homeownership increased dramatically between 1946 and 1971 from 52.6 percent to 70 percent statewide and from 26 percent to 48 percent in Dublin and 13 percent to 49 percent in Cork. Nevertheless, significant social housing output also saw Council housing as a percentage of the overall housing stock during this period increase from 16.5 percent to 18.4 percent.

The late 60s and early 70s was also a period of increasing investment in city centre commercial development with significant private and semi-State developments replacing some of the historic core of Dublin City. As slums were cleared, speculative developers could make significant gains replacing Georgian terraces with modern office blocks. The result was a profound change to the streetscape and aesthetics of large parts of the city centre generating strong opposition from the Georgian Society, high profile cultural figures and members of the public. That the Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government unsurprisingly took the side of ‘progress’ – and the developer – dismissing the protestors as ‘belted earls’, was a sign of the increasing political strength of those who had money to invest in property.44

The significant increase in private housing output brought a new dynamic into play, namely land price inflation. As residential development increasingly took place in suburbs, once-agricultural land would significantly rise in price when zoned for residential use. Of course, the increase in value had nothing to do with the land itself or the efforts of the owners, but was a direct result of both the decision to rezone and the provision of infrastructure such as roads and services by the Local Authorities.

In one example, serviced land in County Dublin rose in price in a single year from £1,100 per acre to £7,000 – a 536 percent increase in value.

In response the Government commissioned respected judge John Kenny to examine the issue of land management and bring forward recommendations to curb the ever escalating cost of land. The 1972 Report from the Committee on the Price of Land made a series of radical proposals which have been quoted as often as they have been ignored.

Amongst the options considered were price controls, development levies, direct payment to Local Authorities for services, various tax measures and nationalisation. The report stated a clear preference for the compulsory purchase of private land in high demand areas at original use value plus 25 percent of the uplift expected from residential zoning.

The land could then either be used for social housing or sold on to developers at below market prices for private development.

The recommendations of the report were never implemented. Land price inflation, and with it house price inflation, remained a significant problem in the housing system. Subsequent generations of policy-makers would return time and again to the same debate as a housing boom would re-present the very same problems as those which the Fianna Fail Government of the late 1960s and Fine Gael–Labour Government of the early 1970s failed to address.

While social housing output expanded significantly during the 1970s private ownership raced ahead. The decade saw private sector building increase threefold, and Government placed ever greater emphasis on subsidising private homeownership through grants and tenant purchase. A further 59,566 Council homes were sold at significant discounts to tenants in that decade, almost the same number as new Council homes built by Local Authorities.

Housing in the 1970s, a White Paper published in 1969, once again emphasised the State’s preference for owner-occupation on both social and economic grounds. According to Kenna, a National Economic and Social Council research paper published later in the decade confirmed that ‘in 1975, the aggregate proportionate subsidisation of owner-occupiers was greater than that of local authority tenants’.45

In the same year social housing hit what was to be its highest ever level of output at 8,800. Never again was the State to produce as many Council homes in a single year. Indeed, through the 1970s and early 80s social housing output never fell below 20 percent of total housing output with the single exception of 1981.

Finally, after half a century the Southern State was finally getting to grips with current housing need and providing a sufficient supply of both private and public homes to meet the vast majority of demand. The slums had been cleared, waiting lists were small and short. Norris described this period as ‘the saturation phase’, as during

this period, the land project was extended to its furthest practicable limits and public subsidisation of homeownership was extended from the rural population to the urban middle class (via subsidies such as grants and rates remission and local government loans) and also to the working class in the cities (via the extension of tenant purchase of social housing.46

While there is no doubt that between the end of the Emergency and the early 1970s the housing need of ever growing sections of Irish society was being met, including that of lower-income families, other groups in society continued to be left behind.

Government policy and legislation was still blind to those with no homes at all. As a result, students in Trinity College Dublin founded the first Irish branch of the Simon Communities in 1969. Inspired by the pioneering work of Anton Wallich-Clifford, who founded the Simon Communities in London in 1963, the group aimed to highlight the plight of rough sleepers and those without any accommodation and to provide on a voluntary basis some form of emergency accommodation.

The other group who remained invisible to official Ireland was the Travelling Community. While the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963 brought the issue of Travellers into the mainstream of policy debate it did so by seeking to eradicate the nomadic culture of Travellers by forcing them into settled housing. The move failed and simply forced Travellers into illegal occupation of roadside camps.

It would take several decades before Government policy and legislation even started to grapple with the issues of homelessness and Traveller-appropriate accommodation in any serious way.

As is so often the case public opinion was more alert to the contradictions evident in the proximity of continued acute housing need with a construction boom and dramatically rising land values. Alongside radical left republican campaigns for better housing were increasingly vocal social justice advocates from within the faith communities. Logos, a left-wing catholic group active on housing issues, was founded by John Feeney. A Dominican priest, Fr Ferghal O’Connor, founded Ally, a housing charity for single parents.

Priests were also using their influence in broadcasting to highlight housing inequalities much to the ire of the Government. A 1968 broadcast of the RTÉ show Outlook edited by Fr Austin Flannery, featured a discussion on the housing issue with the Jesuit Michael Sweetman and Communist Party of Ireland spokesperson Michael O’Riordan. The Minister for Local Government accused Flannery of an ‘abuse of privilege’ by a ‘so called cleric’ while the Minister for Finance and future Taoiseach Charles Haughey dismissed the priest as ‘gullible’. The very public spat continued into the pages of the week’s newspapers with a formal rebuttal from Flannery in the Evening Herald. For his efforts in highlighting the plight of those not served by Government housing policy the Garda Special Branch allocated an officer to sit in studio for every future Flannery-produced show.47

Conclusion

The politics of housing provision from 1870 to the early 1970s displays a number of dynamics that shaped and continues to shape the Irish housing system into the twenty-first century.

There is a cycle that starts with intolerable conditions: urban and rural poverty, insecurity of tenure, high rents and illegal evictions. The everyday inequality and unfairness of the housing system reaches some tipping point in the form of famine, disease or building collapse, all of which involve death.

Frustration and anger turn to social mobilisation whether through the Land League, trade union movement or Housing Action Committees. People at the sharp edge of a bad, abnormal, difficult, dysfunctional housing system mobilise in their tens of thousands in rural Ireland and their thousands in the cities and towns.

In turn politicians, both honest and expedient, take notice and join the fray, passing motions and lobbying for legislative change. Under pressure in parliament and facing the very real potential for social revolt and the collapse of public order Government responds in a slow and piecemeal fashion.

The pace of reform is determined by the strength of the social mobilisation and the coherence of the organisations through which those most affected organise their efforts.

Progress in land reform and rural housing at the turn of the century far outstripped change in urban Ireland because the size and strength of the land movement was so much greater than their urban counterparts.

However, what is more striking than the disparity between urban and rural housing policy during the first half of the twentieth century is the underlying principle guiding both, namely promoting owner-occupation.

Almost all of the legislative and policy responses to housing need, first by Westminster and then the Free State Government, were based on a single principle, private ownership. Land purchase, rural cottages and even some urban charitable and public housing would be owned by the tenants purchased through low interest, long-term loans.

It is remarkable that by 1914 Government had provided 45,000 homes, 82 percent in rural areas, through various loan schemes. In Britain, the Government had built a mere 24,000. But whereas in twentieth-century Britain public housing would predominantly be Council owned, in Ireland the State was less eager to take up the role of landlord. Rather it saw its function as assisting working people, both rural and urban, is accessing credit to own their own homes.

While funding for the provision of subsidised housing for the very poor would start to emerge before partition, in reality it was not until 1932 that public housing delivered by Local Authorities would become a significant feature of the housing system.

Even here, the dramatic expansion of tenant purchase from the 1960s meant that public housing would become a significant gateway to private homeownership for tens of thousands of families.

Private homeownership for the majority with a small supply of public housing for the very poor was to become the policy framework in which successive Governments in Dublin responded to housing need.

Michelle Norris, in her ground-breaking study Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State characterises the dramatic scale of State intervention in private homeownership as ‘asset based welfare’. She challenges the argument that the Southern Irish State, in contrast to many of its liberal and social democratic neighbours, failed to develop a comprehensive welfare regime.

Instead she contends that, rather than developing a welfare state that focuses on the redistribution of income and provision of social services that was the hallmark of the welfare regimes elsewhere, Irish Governments prioritised ownership of property.

Thus rather than a welfare state based on a grand bargain between workers and employers, a distinctively Irish system emerged from the grand bargain between landlords and tenant farmers underpinned by low interest, long-term subsidised loans for the purchase of land and housing.

Publicly owned housing was and would always remain peripheral to this system as Governments were slowly dragged into meeting the housing needs of the urban working class and rural landless labourers.

As housing policy developed throughout the first half of the twentieth century other key issues did emerge including planning, land management and value, and the relationship between industry and politicians. While each of these was to become more important from the 1970s onwards they remained peripheral to the key issue of ownership.

By the 1970s those issues that had dominated housing insecurity for the majority only decades earlier – illegal eviction, rack renting, tenement slums – were now thankfully a thing of the past. But not for everyone.

The dramatic rise in owner-occupation and the provision of public housing meant that 87 percent of people had a secure home. But for the 13 percent remaining in an unregulated private rental sector or left to fend for themselves on the roadside in illegal halting sites not much had changed since partition.

And even for those with secure homes, poor quality construction during the 1930s meant many, particularly in older public housing, could rightly complain of poor conditions. The failure of Government to ensure that Local Councils had sufficient funds to maintain their stock of social housing to adequate standards would remain a serious issue into the future.

The late 1970s was certainly the high point in housing provision of the twentieth century. That decade marked the apex of the State’s involvement in the direct funding and provision of housing whether for owner-occupiers or social rental tenants.

But there were also problems. State intervention wasn’t consistent enough, as each time Government appeared to be getting on top of housing need they would take their foot off the pedal and reduce expenditure. Not all slums were cleared and not all housing was of a good standard. And beneath the surface of the system lay significant vulnerabilities, kept out of sight by massive levels of State subsidies whether in the form of grants, loans or tax breaks.

In the following decades the structure of our dysfunctional system did not change much but the financing of it did. These changes, detailed in the next chapter, revealed the weaknesses within the system as it had been designed to date while at the same time introducing new risks and vulnerabilities which in turn would generate levels of housing insecurity and need that many thought were now a thing of the past.