by Conor McCabe
For the next six years, the administration of the capital, including the social housing programme, was in the hands of three government-appointed Commissioners.
The Housing (Building Facilities) Act was passed by the Dáil in April 1924. It provided grants of between £60 and £100 to anyone building a house for their own use, for sale, or for rent. It also offered remissions on local authority rates. The maximum selling prices were £270, £300 and £450, for three, four and five-roomed houses respectively. An additional Housing Act was passed in 1925, which expanded on the themes of speculation and owner-occupancy.
Although these Acts applied to all urban local authorities, most construction took place in Dublin and Cork. Cathal O’Connell, in his book The State and Housing in Ireland, explains why:
The modest level of housing activity which these Acts stimulated was limited to Dublin and Cork – big local authorities who could raise money through bond issues on the stock exchange. This is illustrated in the figures for house completions. Fully 80 per cent of all local authority building by local authorities was carried out by Dublin and Cork Corporations. Because the Local Loans Fund, the mechanism used to finance local authority infrastructure projects, did not extend to housing schemes, smaller local authorities who wanted to proceed with schemes had to borrow funds from commercial banks who were very reluctant to lend money for such ‘unproductive’ purposes.16
The majority of houses built under the Acts was done so not by speculative builders but by owner-occupiers. This was the type of laissez-faire construction that Johnson had warned about, and the local authorities had opposed before their suspension.
Nevertheless, future owner-occupiers as builders of their own homes, using whatever sites they could and lacking any sense of town planning, was seen as a positive outcome by the government. The argument was that this process would free up the quality rented accommodation previously occupied by the now property-owning middle classes. These vacancies would eventually filter down to the slums, allowing those who could afford the rents to move up the housing chain. The problem was one of congestion, the government said, and the 1924 Act would help to relieve this.
For that to happen, though, populations would have to have remained absolutely static. The moment that more people entered the equation – through births, the continued migration of thousands from rural to urban areas, and by people starting families of their own – the spurious symmetry of housing which is freed up for those at the bottom by those at the top, is gone.
The government’s plan also required that the housing problem itself did not exist. They maintained that it was not housing that was the problem, but the lack of better housing for the middle classes which was causing the bottleneck within the slums. It was as if the need for housing was akin to a tram queue, one that no new passenger ever joins, but which is made shorter by those at the top buying cars and becoming transport-occupiers instead. Yet, this was the logic: middle-class people and property speculators, building and selling houses with public money, will make life better for those in the tenements and slums.
The reason why local authorities were excluded from the Act was all too clear to Richard Corish, the Labour Party TD for Wexford. On 25 January 1924, he spoke in the Dáil in relation to the Housing Bill:
The President has suggested here, on more than one occasion, that the reason that prompted him to take this matter out of the hands of the local authorities was that the houses would cost too much money if they were built under their jurisdiction. I do not know whether that argument is correct or not. I do not believe it is correct, because I do not see why the local authorities, whose members represent the people, would squander money to the extent suggested by the President. The only inference to be drawn from the President’s statement is that the money would be squandered. I have yet to learn that any private builder will take as much interest in the working classes as a local authority. I do not think the President is going to accomplish what he proposes to set himself to do under this Act, by handing over the building of houses entirely to private builders. This, to my mind, is an invitation to private people to become speculators, without due regard to the fact that these houses are wanted for the housing of the working classes.
In the words of one historian, the Housing Acts of 1924 and 1925, by emphasising owner-occupation, tended ‘to favour the middle classes, rather than the working classes, for whom the housing problem was so severe’.17
The First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War had all dramatically curtailed building activity in Ireland. By the time hostilities had ceased in 1923, it had been almost ten years since Ireland had seen relatively normal levels of construction. The drop in new housing affected the middle classes, and it was this shortage rather than the horrendous slum conditions in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford that the Free State government made its priority. ‘One might as well try and live in an aeroplane,’ said one Dublin Corporation barrister, summing up the middle-class dilemma, ‘as to get a vacant house in Dublin.’18 The Housing Acts were one element of this strategy, while the other was the construction of suburbs.
‘NOTHING GAINED BY OVERCROWDING’
In 1914, Dublin Corporation commissioned a study for a proposed garden city at Marino from the respected town planners Raymond Unwin and Patrick Geddes, both of whom were admirers and colleagues of Ebenezer Howard. Their original plan called for 1,100 houses with a density of twelve per acre, green paths and a complete separation of traffic and pedestrians.19 A further plan was commissioned in 1918, this time from the City Architect, Charles McCarthy, with final permission given in 1920. This was for 530 houses, construction of which did not begin until 1922 due to the post-war political upheaval.
Marino was Dublin Corporation’s first garden suburb. By the time the final tender was completed in 1927, the scheme had expanded to include Croydon Park and consisted of 1,283 five-roomed houses with a density of twelve per acre. Although it was social housing, the entire scheme was tenant-purchase. On 21 May 1925 the Dublin Borough Commissioners invited ‘applications from persons of the working classes, employed or resident in the City of Dublin, for the purchase of houses at Marino under the Corporation house Purchase Scheme’.20 There were 258 houses available in this first batch and the prices ranged from £400 to £440.
The Corporation received 4,400 applications for the first phase, of which a shortlist of 414 was drawn up. The houses were earmarked for married couples with at least four children, but of the 414 families shortlisted, not one had fewer than six children.21 A deposit of £25 was also required, but the Borough Commissioners – who, since the suspension of the Corporation Council in 1924, had the final say in all applications – stated that ‘preference, however, will be given to intending occupiers who are prepared to deposit the whole or a substantial portion of the purchase money’.22 Each applicant had to be able to meet the minimum weekly repayments of 15-16s a week. Such financial barriers meant that the Marino scheme was out of the range of the majority of Dublin’s working class.
In March 1927, tenders were advertised for the erection of 128 three-roomed houses, seventy-seven four-roomed and sixty-one five-roomed in the fields behind St Patrick’s Training College, Drumcondra. This was the first time that Dublin Corporation had tendered for three-roomed houses and as with Marino, the scheme was tenant-purchase. Prices went from £230 for a mid-terraced three-room, to £460 for a semi-detached five-room, with the Corporation offering forty-year loans at 5¾ per cent for part or all of the price.23 The weekly cost to the purchaser ranged from 9-17s a week, depending on house size. On its completion in 1929, the scheme consisted of 535 houses: 211 three-room, 144 four-room, and 180 five-room.
Dublin Corporation began construction on Donnycarney in 1929, which, upon its completion, comprised 421 houses of four rooms each. Prices ranged from £300 to £380, and again were offered to married couples with four or more children. Similar prices and offers were made with regard to the first section of
the Cabra area scheme at Fassaugh Lane. The Corporation had also begun construction on 484 houses in Emmet Road, Inchicore, with prices ranging from £300 to £440.
In September 1926, the Cork Commissioner announced at a meeting of the city’s Rotary Club that he ‘proposed to raise a loan of £100,000 Corporation Stock, to be expended on the building of 200 new houses in the city’.24 The houses were built on land behind Evergreen Road and to the side of Curragh Road, and followed the construction of 158 houses at Capwell. As with the Dublin housing schemes, the Cork houses were for purchase only. During this time, one ninth of the population of Cork City lived in tenements. Mr Monaghan was following Dublin’s lead by providing ‘affordable’ housing for those in secure employment with relatively high wages, as a means of combating the problems of the tenements and slums.
Between 1924 and 1929, the Dublin City Commissioners sanctioned the construction of around 2,436 houses, almost all of which were sold by tenant purchase.25 The price of the houses, and the cost of the loan repayments in the form of weekly rents of 9-17s a week, meant that the effect of the new houses on the city’s slums and tenements was negligible.
The Free State’s policy of owner-occupancy was applied to schemes completed before 1924. Over the next ten years, all of Dublin Corporation’s suburban cottages – a total of 4,248 dwellings – had been sold to tenants.26
Prior to independence, Dublin Corporation’s housing policy was primarily concerned with providing ‘cheap dwellings for unskilled labourers in central districts’.27 However, there was a significant body of opinion which opposed this policy. In early 1916, both the Citizens’ Housing League and the recently formed Dublin Tenants’ League (headed by William Larkin, brother of Jim) argued that garden suburbs were the only solution to the city’s slums. This was broadly in line with the social ideals of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement. Post-independence, the Free State government took on board a lot of the architectural ideals of Howard – twelve houses per acre, with gardens, and schools and shops as part of the layout – while pushing to one side the social, economic, and cultural arguments which underpinned his work.
The entry of Fianna Fáil into the Dáil in 1927 changed the dynamic somewhat, and in 1929 Cumann na nGaedheal passed a Housing Act which provided some relief to the majority at the end of the scale. This was followed by the 1931 Housing Act which placed slum clearance centre stage. It provided for ‘The clearance of unhealthy areas, the demolition and repair of unhealthy houses, the compulsory acquisition of land, and the assessment of compensation’.28
These objectives were given a further boost in 1932 with the Fianna Fáil-sponsored Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous) Act, which enabled local authorities to fund slum clearance on the type of scale demanded by the problem. The legislation stated that preference be given to families living in one-roomed dwellings, where either:
(a) one or more members of the family is or are suffering from tuberculosis; or
(b) one or more members of the family, exclusive of the parents, has or have attained the age of sixteen years; or
(c) the dwelling has been condemned as being unfit for human habitation.
The Act also required that ‘The Minister [for Local Government] shall not make any contribution under this section towards the expenses incurred by local authorities in the provision of houses in respect of which grants have been made by him under the Housing Acts, 1925 to 1930’. Fianna Fáil were not just building upon the 1931 Housing Act, they were making a clear break with Cumann na nGaedheal’s policy of housing the middle classes and more ‘respectable’ working classes.
1932 TO 1948
The majority of the working class could not apply for Cumann na nGaedheal’s house purchase schemes. The structural deficiencies within the Irish economy would not allow it. The type of employment needed to sustain a universal owner-occupancy policy simply did not exist. Fianna Fáil recognised this, and set out not only to provide housing for those at the lower end of the wage scale, but also to create the type of economy which would sustain an urban population and limit the drain from rural society. It introduced a series of tariffs and incentives to bolster local industry, and returned to building flats in central locations and houses for rent rather than purchase.
Under the various Housing Acts, local authority housing (as opposed to local authority building grants) was earmarked for the working classes in the towns and cities and agricultural labourers in the countryside. The 1908 Housing Act, which was the legislative baseline for all Irish Housing Acts until it was repealed in 1966, provided a definition of ‘working classes’. It read:
The expression ‘working classes’ shall include mechanics, artisans, labourers, and others working for wages, hawkers, costermongers [street sellers], persons not working for wages but working at some trade or handicraft without employing others except members of their own family, and persons, other than domestic servants, whose income in any case does not exceed an average of thirty shillings a week, and the families of any such persons who may be residing with them.
The Dublin Housing Inquiry, which sat from 1939 to 1943, having considered popular and official views of ‘working classes’, took the view that the phrase covered:
All classes of adult persons in receipt of an average weekly income not exceeding the highest wage rate of a skilled tradesman. We naturally exclude persons who have substantial reserves of property or capital, even if their current wage income would otherwise qualify them. We also exclude those persons obviously belonging to a higher economic category whose current earnings may be low owing to terms of apprenticeship, training, instruction, probation, or similar conditions.29
Despite the inquiry’s best efforts, it could not come up with an actual figure for Dublin’s working class based on income, because in the early 1940s the Revenue Commissioners did not have this information. Instead, it had to rely on the 1936 census reports for occupations, and through this criteria, it came to the conclusion that working-class households constituted 75 per cent of the capital’s families.
In terms of housing, the problem was not that 75 per cent of Dublin’s households were working class, but that under Ireland’s economy the wages were so low as to make the provision of housing for the working class on a private, profitable basis virtually impossible. As we have seen, houses tended to be built by their future occupiers, and where speculative construction did take place, it was not uncommon for the houses to be sold to landlords rather than to owner-occupiers. Private housing on a scale necessary to address the needs of the working population was unthinkable under the Irish Free State’s low-wage, export-led, agrarian-based economy.
However, in order to qualify for a local authority house or flat, it was not enough to be a member of the working classes; you had to be able to pay the rent as well.
The available pool of rent payers had an influence on loan floatations. The ability of prospective tenants to pay rent affected the terms and conditions of the construction loans. Most local authorities believed that one fifth or more of income on rent was too heavy a demand on the tenant, as such levels of payment undermined the householder’s ability to feed and clothe his or her family. As such, public housing rents were often less than this ratio. These so-called ‘uneconomic rents’ were possible only through substantial rate and State subsidy. Even with this, families with very low incomes were often passed over in favour of families with enough of an income to pay corporation rents after the family’s physical needs had been met.
The housing schemes of Crumlin, Cabra, North Lotts, Terenure and Harold’s Cross dominated the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1939, Dublin Corporation built 6,019 cottages for rent, of which more than half were in Crumlin. By way of comparison, just 229 were built by the Cumann na nGaedheal government in the previous eight years. Fianna Fáil also returned to providing flats in central locations. In 1931, the City Architect was instructed to ‘construct a three-room model flat, the expenditure not to exceed £30, so that a clear
idea may be gained of the class and extent of the accommodation which a dwelling of this type will contain’.30 The largest schemes centred on Cook Street, Hanover Street, Railway Street, Popular Row and Mary’s Lane. Between them they accounted for almost 70 per cent of the 1,619 flats built between 1933 and 1939.
The scale of the 1930s housing schemes can be seen by the fact that in the forty-four years prior to 1931, Dublin Corporation had built 7,246 dwellings, 78 per cent of which were houses.31 This figure was doubled over the next eight years.
The 1946 census is the earliest we have which gives a breakdown of owner-occupancy in Ireland. Of the 662,654 private dwellings recorded that year, 348,737 (or 52.6 per cent) were either owned outright or were being purchased by the householder. There were 31,173 dwellings which were occupied rent-free, leaving 282,744 (or 42.7 per cent) which were rented. However, these national averages were by no means uniform across the State. In Kildare, owner-occupancy stood at 38 per cent, while in Mayo it was 86.2 per cent. There was also a significant difference between rural and urban areas. Cork County Borough (i.e. Cork City), for example, had a home-ownership level of only 13.2 per cent. Similar levels were recorded in the county boroughs of Waterford (13.6 per cent), and Limerick (13.8 per cent). In Dublin City, owner-occupancy stood at 23 per cent, while in Dún Laoghaire it was 30.8 per cent.
