Sins of the Father

by Conor McCabe

  Even where offered, home ownership was not the automatic choice for working-class families. In 1923, the Labour Party noted that with home ownership as the only solution offered to the housing problem, ‘workers are being compelled to purchase their homes and [are] saddled with the cost of maintenance’.32 Twenty years later the Dublin Housing Inquiry noted that ‘many tenants did not want to buy a house, but used the only means at their disposal of getting a house. If similar accommodation could have been got on renting terms most of them would have preferred it.’

  The policies of the local authorities which placed garden suburbs on the edge of the cities were at odds with the practicalities of working-class life. It was remarked at a meeting of the Civics Institute that ‘it seemed to be impossible to induce people to go outside the city (i.e. to newly built suburban areas), even if dwellings were there for them’.33 Families were allocated houses by the Dublin Corporation, but were done so on an individual basis. In other words, families, not communities, were moved to the garden suburbs. Often there was little public transport available, and the houses were quite a distance from where people worked and socialised. There were few shops, and even fewer pubs. The families that moved to Crumlin in the 1930s were saddled with an increased cost of living. In 1940, Jim Larkin told the Government Housing Commission that up to ‘20 per cent of the tenants in the Crumlin area were living below starvation level’.34 His evidence was collaborated by Dr C. Hannigan, Crumlin, who told the Dublin Board of Assistance in May 1940 of a case of:

  … a man and his wife and eight children, whose income was 25 shillings a week, out of which rent and light absorbed one-half a week. The children were sent to an outside school so as to get the benefit of the midday free meal. The diet of the family consisted of bread and tea.35

  The corporation’s policy of building large numbers of three-roomed houses in Crumlin was at odds with its allocation policy which gave precedence to the largest families: ‘Almost 70 per cent of the families who were allocated Corporation housing from 1934 to 1939 had more than six members, yet only 39 per cent of the houses built at Crumlin South had four rooms.’36 The ‘garden cities’ plan for Crumlin in the 1930s was as far from Howard’s original idea as the Marino and Donneycarney schemes of the 1920s, albeit in different ways. Whereas Cumann na nGaedheal took the aesthetics of garden suburbs and privatised it, Fianna Fáil built more, with fewer rooms, and made them for rent. The idea of the garden suburb as an interconnected community of work, shelter, education and leisure, was as elusive as ever. In the words of Máirin Johnston, author of Around the Banks of Pimlico, ‘housing schemes gave [the people] houses, but it stripped away the fabric of their lives’.37

  The scale of construction, however, was entirely new. From 1898 to 1948, over 100,000 dwellings were constructed by local authorities, and a further 80,000 by private citizens and speculative builders with public financial assistance. Yet, 65 per cent of these dwellings had been constructed during Fianna Fáil’s tenure in government, ‘53,000 by the local authorities and 66,000 by private persons under the Housing Acts, 1932 to 1946’.38 Fianna Fáil had promised to build flats and houses for the working classes, and to a large degree it had kept its promise.

  The war years greatly curtailed construction, due to a shortage of manpower and materials. In January 1948, the Department of Local Government circulated a White Paper on housing, and estimated that approximately 100,000 new dwellings were required, of which 60,000 were needed to house the working classes. A general election was held in February 1948 which was lost by Fianna Fáil and led to the formation of the first Inter-Party government. It also led to a change in emphasis in housing policy.

  1948 TO 1959

  The Irish Times printed an editorial in July 1948 entitled ‘White Collar Dwellings’. It welcomed the news that Dublin Corporation was extending the issuing of loans to builders and potential owner-occupiers under the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act:

  Faced by the exigent need to make some provision for those who are not rich enough to pay for the type of homestead that seemed to be within reach ten years ago, or poor enough to qualify for the tenancy of a Corporation cottage, Ministers, as we believe, are justified in their decision to extend to the fullest possible measure of assistance to those who are able and willing to contribute towards the solution of their own problem of housing.39

  The formation of the first Inter-Party government in February of that year saw the return of Cumann na nGaedheal (now renamed Fine Gael) to power for the first time in sixteen years and the resetting of owner-occupancy as a cornerstone of housing policy.

  The policy was not to restrict house prices in order to accommodate affordability, but to use government money to chase after rising prices. ‘Even the most modest type of dwelling for the average wage-earner and his family is likely to cost something not far short of £2,000,’ wrote The Irish Times in its July editorial, ‘a figure which represented the pre-war cost of modern villa residences for comparatively wealthy people.’ Yet, instead of embracing the logical conclusion – that as free-market speculators and private builders cannot provide affordable housing, it’s probably best not to leave such a fundamental societal need in the hands of those who cannot provide it – the government began to once again subsidise private builders with public money in order to make housing purchases ‘affordable’ for the middle classes.

  Two years previously, The Irish Times criticised the policy of rehousing ‘thousands of families … at the public expense’ while there were ‘hundreds of citizens’ who could buy their own homes ‘if only they can buy them on reasonable terms, and thus can do without State or local bounty’.40 The fact that these ‘reasonable citizens’ needed as much State assistance to buy their homes as the thousands of families who needed State assistance to rent their homes, was conveniently ignored not only by The Irish Times but by a government which saw subsidised private ownership and private construction for the middle class as acts of citizenship, and subsidised rents for the working class as ‘a public expense’. This idea of ownership as citizenship, and rent as scrounging, would eventually shed the language of class which enveloped it during this period, but none of the class dynamics from which it gained its energy and direction.

  The first Inter-Party government allocated £580,000 to private building in its 1948 Housing Act, and by 30 June 1949 the Department for Local Government had approved 6,292 grants. The majority of these grants – 4,247 – were for housing in rural areas. The Department’s Minister and Labour TD Michael Keyes told the Dáil that:

  … private enterprise could make a very valuable contribution to the solution of the housing problem. And it was, therefore, desirable that any uncertainty as to future policy in the matter of grants should be removed, so as to allow full scope to persons intending to plan for the building and reconstruction of houses within the next two or three years.41

  He was speaking on the occasion of the Dáil debate on the Housing (Amendment) Bill, 1949, which proposed to triple the amount of government spending on private house construction from £580,000 to £1,750,000, and to allow grants for the building of new houses for letting and the reconstruction of existing housing in rural areas. Private landlords would now receive public money in order to provide private rented accommodation.

  The private ownership of a house was often put forward as a panacea for all of society’s ills. Not only would the promotion of home ownership save the local authorities money in the long run, it would also bring stability and good sense to a family. In 1952, the Labour Party senator, James Tunney, told a meeting of Dublin County Council (of which he was chairman) that ‘I am a firm believer in private ownership, because it makes for better citizens, and there is no greater barrier against communism.’42 He went on to say that ‘where all the necessary conditions regarding repair have been complied with, the tenants should be compelled to purchase, unless they could show very good reason for not doing so’. The Educational Building Society (EBS) stated at its annu
al general meeting in 1956 that it was carrying out ‘important social work’ in ‘promoting a property-owning people’.43

  The social arguments for owner-occupancy were raised once again in 1957, by the Bishop of Cork, the Most Revd Dr Cornelius Lucey. ‘The man of property is ever against revolutionary change,’ said Dr Lucey at a Confirmation ceremony at Monkstown, County Cork. ‘Consequently a factor of the first importance in combating emigration and preventing social unrest, unemployment marches, and so on, is the widest possible diffusion of ownership.’44 Dr Lucey raised these points as he believed that ‘ownership [of property] is neither valued nor favoured among us, as it should be’.

  In 1962, a UN team of housing experts, including Charles Abrams, came to Ireland to compile a report on urban renewal. They were suitably impressed with the government’s initiatives, and wrote that Ireland was undertaking ‘one of the largest slum-clearance and public-housing programs in the world in terms of population, has emptied many of the central slum areas of Dublin, and is now proceeding with renewal legislation designed to replace slums with non-residential as well as residential land uses.’45

  One year later, the Minister for Local Government, Neil Blaney, announced his ‘home for every family’ housing policy. He amended legislation so that allocation for local authority housing ‘would not be determined by whether a person was by definition an agricultural labourer of a person of the working classes, but primarily by his need for housing’.46 ‘This,’ he said, ‘would unequivocally admit to eligibility for the benefit of State and local authority facilities all persons in need of housing, including old people, small farmers, widows and other special categories whose needs had not been adequately served under existing legislation.’ Whether it was Blaney’s intention or not, his Housing Bill of 1963 added to the view that local authority housing should be the housing of last resort.

  In February 1966, the Fine Gael TD Mark Clinton put forward a motion during Private Members’ Time in the Dáil, ‘urging the government to facilitate the provision of tenant-purchase schemes for Corporation tenants in Dublin, Cork, and other municipalities’.47 Mr Clinton said that such a move would show that ‘The government was alive to the interests of citizens who wished to better themselves’. This idea was given its fullest expression in the Fianna Fáil government’s Housing Act of 1966, which allowed local authority tenants in urban areas to purchase their houses. It took as its model the 1936 Labourers’ Act, under which almost 80 per cent of the 86,931 labourers’ cottages had been sold to tenants in the twenty-eight years since its inception. During the same period, 6,393 urban dwellings had been sold to tenants.48 This figure dramatically increased over the next twenty-five years.

  In 1971 there were 112,320 local authority rental housing units in the State, which amounted to 15.9 per cent of the total households. By 1981 this figure had dropped to 111,739, and now constituted 12.4 per cent of total households. Yet, there were 64,170 new local authority units completed between 1971 and 1980. The State was selling its public housing stock to its tenants quicker than it could build it. The amount of households in urban areas in 1981 that either owned their property or were buying their house from a local authority was 65.6 per cent. In 1961 that figure was 37.9 per cent. The tenant-purchase scheme had been heavily utilised, and resulted in ‘waves of heavy selling of local authority housing.’49

  Purchase prices for local authority housing were typically extremely favourable to tenants. The tenant-purchase scheme implemented by Dublin Corporation in the late 1980s, for example, entitled discounts on the market value of housing of up to 60 per cent. The consequence for Irish social housing was that by the early 1990s, of the 330,000 dwellings built by local authorities over the previous century, some 220,000 had been sold to tenants, which amounted to one in four of the homes in private ownership in Ireland by that time. They were thus a major contributor to the overall tenure revolution and in particular were the dominant means of access to home ownership for the urban and working classes.

  Home ownership reached its peak in the early 1990s, with 74.5 per cent of all households in urban areas, and 81 per cent of all households nationwide, listed as owner-occupied or occupied free of rent.50 What had been paid for collectively, had been sold off individually. The de facto privatisation of Irish housing meant that the need for a house was now replaced by the need for a mortgage. The banks, building societies and mortgage brokers were the unchallenged gatekeepers to securing a home.

  By the end of the 1960s, there was an estimated housing need of 59,000 – with unfit houses of 35,000 and overcrowding of 24,000.51 The State would need to build 9,000 dwellings a year, with projections for the mid-1970s at 11,500 a year ‘to meet the loss of dwellings through obsolescence, etc., and to provide for increases in numbers of households’. It was reported that with increased prosperity, local authority housing was no longer a priority, and that the majority of housing would be produced by private builders and other agencies.

  1971 TO 1987

  In the 1970s the State, having already secured the legislative framework to privatise urban local authority housing, now undertook to privatise house loans. It is during this decade that government strategy moves towards assisting families with mortgages, rather than assisting families with houses. It was a crucial development. The government was funding prices, and those prices were being set by builders and estate agents, often in collusion with building societies and banks. Ireland’s property market was soon dictated almost exclusively by speculation. It was not how much money people earned, but how much credit they could secure, which set the bar for prices. It led to the bizarre situation where Irish people were paying twice for the same house. The Irish taxpayer had to pay to fund the grants and exemptions to make private housing ‘affordable’; then, the same taxpayer had to go out and buy a mortgage for a house, the price of which had increased precisely because of the grants and incentives which the taxpayer was funding in the first place. Yet, by the start of the 1980s, this had become normal and ‘common sense’.

  The idea of a house as a speculative product, not just for builders but for owner-occupiers, also gathered momentum throughout this decade. ‘One of the oldest ghosts in the residential market was laid this week by Mr Edmund Farrell, chairman of the Irish Permanent Building Society,’ wrote The Irish Times in February 1973, ‘when he revealed that the purchase of a new home is not necessarily the biggest single lifetime investment – simply because the average building society mortgage has itself a lifetime of only about ten years.’52 The article explained that:

  The significance of this information is considerable, and it does much to explain the frenzy of activity both in the residential market and in the £150 million Irish building societies’ movement. If the average mortgage is ‘turned over’ once in a decade, the average man can buy not one, but two or three different homes in his working life.

  What is emerging – trendwise, as the Americans put it – is a housing requirement that sensibly fluctuates with the homeowner’s personal needs. In the early stages of a man’s married life, for example, his space requirements are relatively small … later with an increased family, our subject can move to a three-bedroom house in a suburban estate, close to schools and probably to a shopping centre. As the family gets bigger, there can be yet another move, possibly to a four or even more bedroomed house, depending upon the finance that’s available. And finally, to complete the circle, as the children grow up and move away to start their own housing-cycle, the parents can sell the family home and buy a flat closer to town and its infrastructural centre …

  And, most important point of all for the saver and investor in the housing market as it is and will be for the foreseeable future, a hefty profit is made by the seller at each point in the cycle.

  The privatisation of housing cured not only social ills and moral fickleness, but, according to The Irish Times and the building societies, it also settled all your financial upsets and indigestions. In September 1973 the
paper told its readers that property was the perfect ‘hedge against falling money values’.53 Property was moral-proof, future-proof, and inflation-proof.

  The reality was that as the decade progressed, prices increased and mortgages of twenty-five and thirty years’ duration became the norm. A householder may change house, but rarely was it after having completed his payments on a ten-year mortgage. Not only that; this fantasy world of full employment and eternal growth – where people swap houses like shoes for slippers – never materialised. Indeed, within eighteen months of the Irish Times’ strident pronouncement of the dawn of the Four Property Stages of Man, the Irish economy was in recession.

  At the start of 1974, in a statement which would become all too common thirty years later, the president of the Irish Auctioneers’ and Valuers’ Institute, Mr Anthony Morrissey, said that the drop in house sales was due to a lack of lending in the economy. Building societies and local authorities weren’t making loans available to house buyers, and this was leading to a downturn in the market. The solution was more credit. The government needed to act to save the construction industry. ‘Restrictions and preconditions on building society financing must have a negative effect on the property market and on the chances of achieving national housing targets,’ said Morrissey. ‘A more lasting solution must lie in the further assistance of the [building] societies by the government or by the provision of house finance at realistic levels and in large quantities by the government itself either directly or through some agency.’54

  One year later, the Minister for Local Government and Labour TD James Tully issued a statement pointing out the problems with providing mortgage assistance rather than actual housing. ‘One basic problem which these people overlook,’ he said, ‘is that, in the ultimate, additional subsidies can come only out of taxation and must be met by the community at large, including those who are not yet fortunate enough to have a house of their own.’55 From 1971 to 1974, Irish building societies’ assets had grown from £80 million to £200 million, yet they still claimed the poor mouth and received a government-backed loan of £5 million in the autumn of 1974 to help them over this particular credit crunch.56 By the autumn of 1976, the building societies had assets of over £350 million.