Sins of the Father (3 page)

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’.
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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.
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The price of the houses, and the cost of the loan repayments in the form of weekly rents of 9-17
s
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.
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Prior to independence, Dublin Corporation’s housing policy was primarily concerned with providing ‘cheap dwellings for unskilled labourers in central districts’.
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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’.
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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.

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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.

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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.