Born in 1870 in Dublin, Lambert McKenna was a Jesuit and Catholic social thinker. Beyond his work on the Irish language and bardic poetry, his scholarly interests also focused on labour issues and contemporary current events, both at home and abroad.
First published in Studies in 1919, McKenna’s strident criticism of the early 20th century Dublin housing crisis has resounding echoes in the Ireland of today. The extract below highlights just how many of the issues identified by McKenna within The Housing Problem in Dublin – from the social impact of housing insecurity, prohibitive building costs, lack of public transit infrastructure, and insufficient social building – remain electoral issues in the Ireland of today.
Lambert McKenna, ‘The Housing Problem in Dublin’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 8, No. 30 (June 1919), 279-295. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30092746
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The authorities responsible for the government of this country are about to deal with the housing problem. An Irish Housing Bill is to be laid before Parliament. Anything like the housing scandal in Irish towns would never have arisen under a proper government; a government with even a moderate sense of duty would not have left it unremedied so long.
The provision of decent housing for the classes of the community which, owing to a general economic depression, cannot provide it for themselves is one of the first duties of any government. It is indeed a crime of the first magnitude to allow those who do most for the welfare and comfort of the nation to be shut off almost completely from an essential element of that welfare and comfort, namely, proper housing.
A decent dwelling means much more than a building in which a man and his family are protected from the weather and can enjoy some physical comfort. There is only one test question whereby to judge whether the house of any man, even the poorest man, is such as he should have. That question is: “Is it suitable for the living of family life?”…That such houses should be available for all, even the poorest, is a matter of vital consequence to the Irish nation, and in particular to the city of Dublin. Indeed the state of housing in Dublin is so intimately connected with the general life of the nation, and reacts so deeply and so widely outside the metropolis, that it assumes the importance of a national issue.
…As regards the numbers of people badly housed in Dublin, the facts as given by the 1914 Local Government Housing Committee were as follows: Of the 304,802 persons in Dublin, 194,250 (viz., 63 per cent.) belonged to the working class. Of these, 32,000 had been placed in new houses, and 34,000 others lived in fairly decent single houses which did not come under the Committee’s terms of reference. The rest of the working-class population (128,250 persons) consisted of 25,822 families, living in 5,322 tenement houses, and 2,257 families living in 2,413 small slum houses.
The Committee hoped that 3,804 of the tenement houses (then housing 18,991 families) could be reconstructed; and that 1,121 of the small slum houses were not beyond repair. These 3,804 tenement houses were calculated to accommodate, when reconstructed, 13,000 families, so that the other 5,991 families then living in them would have to be provided with new dwellings. Besides these, there were the 6,831 families living in 1,581 irreparable tenement houses and the 1,136 families living in 1,136 condemned small houses. The Committee therefore proposed, besides the reconstruction of 3,804 tenement houses, that 14,000 new cottages should be built; in other words they held that 124,000 people urgently required new housing.
Such was the state of things set forth by the 1914 Housing Inquiry. It has not improved since. Slum houses are rapidly deteriorating and becoming even dangerous to life. Of the 5,322 existing in 1914, 1,000 have since been closed up, with, of course, the result that the 4,150 families in them had to leave. Of these families 587 have since been rehoused in 474 block-building dwellings and 113 cottages; the other 3,563 families have gone to intensify the congestion of the still standing 6,735 tenement houses, or have been packed into small single houses through the city. It is not, therefore, surprising that Mr.Cowan says 16,500 new houses are now needed. To remedy this state of affairs it is plain that vast sums of money will be required.
…There can, of course, be no question of blaming the Corporation for the insufficiency of the housing provided up to this. The blame for that falls on the Government, whose terms for the loans of money have been prohibitive. Criticism, however, as to the nature of the accommodation provided, and as to the general method of dealing with the slum problem, must be directed chiefly on the Corporation Housing authorities, though the Local Government Board by sanctioning the Corporation’s schemes, must be held as partly responsible.
Let us see, then, what the Municipality has done. The figures I give are quite up-to-date. Of the 2,323 dwellings which it has built only some 951 are cottages (the rest being in block-buildings), whereas all should have been cottages; of these 951 cottages less than a fifth are four-room cottages, whereas four-room cottages should have been the prevailing type; lastly, none of the 951 cottages have gardens, whereas all should have had them.
…The Corporation Housing authorities, though challenged and criticised over and over again, have never – not even at the 1914 Inquiry – given any reasoned or detailed explanation of their difficulties, but have treated their critics as ill-informed or malevolent. There would seem to be only three pleas which the Corporation could by any possibility allege in its defence. Firstly, that there is not enough virgin soil conveniently situated for the relieving of the congestion of the slums; secondly, that the building of separate cottages on virgin soil would be too costly; thirdly, that such suburban cottages would not meet the needs or the wishes of the working class. Let us examine these pleas in order.
Can it be said that there is a dearth of virgin soil? According to the Borough Surveyor’s evidence in 1913, there were within the city boundary 1,146 acres of virgin land, not to mention a considerable amount of derelict land – enough to provide sites at the rate of twelve houses an acre for almost all the 14,000 houses required; while just outside the boundary, at places like Artane, Santry, Finglas, Pelletstown, on the North side, and Crumlin, Terenure, Milltown, and Merrion on the South, there is an unlimited quantity of available land. Some of these sites outside, and indeed some inside, the boundary are lacking in facilities for communicating with the centre of the city, but none of the authorities who speak of this matter seem to suspect any very great difficulty about the extension of the tram system and the provision of cheap workpeople’s fares.
Secondly, it is hard to see how the Corporation’s plea of financial stress, used by it on at least one occasion, is of any avail as a defence of its method of attacking the slum problem. It is certain that the total cost (site, clearing, development, building, etc.) of each room in a cottage on slum site is dearer than the total cost of each room in a suburban cottage. The Corporation Housing Committee’s Report (1918) gives the following figures:
Cottage on slum site:
Building, £380 ; Clearing, Roads, Sewers, £50; Site, £120. Total, £550.
Cottage on suburban site:
Building, £380 ; Clearing, Roads, Sewers, £85 ; Site, £35. Total, £450.
Or see the figures in the 1914 Inquiry’s Report (p. 381) by Mr. Tobin, Secretary of the Paving Committee:
Cost of room in Slum-Site Cottage
Cork Street – £71 9s. 8d. (in 1913)
Lurgan Street – £66 18s. 4d. (in 1917)
Cost of room in Suburban Cottage
Inchicore – £49 12s. 8d. (in 1912)
Drumcondra – £59 3s. lld. (in 1904)
The Housing Committee can, therefore, hardly plead that, having to build a certain number of cottages, they were forced through lack of money to build them on slum sites rather than on suburban ground.
The only argument which the Housing Committee has much used in meeting this charge is the argument that virgin sites remote from the centre of the city are not what the workman wants, that the workman must be near his work…Still, the argument that the workman must be near his work seems a poor defence of the Housing Committee’s method of rebuilding the slums.
…Mr. Birrell in a debate of the House of Commons on the 1914 Report, described a visit he paid to a poor old woman in the Dublin slums. He pictured her as regarding him with suspicion as a member of some charitable society who wished to transport her for her own good out into the lonely country. He implied that the chief obstacles to building on the outskirts is the love of the poor for the life and society, such as it is, of the slums. We need not, of course, mind Mr. Birrell, who was ever on the look out for humorous rather than for true views of things; but Mr. Cosgrave, a member of the Housing Committee and one who knows Dublin well, seems to adopt more or less the same view as to the prejudices of the Dublin poor.
In an article in New Ireland (Nov. 17, 1917) he states that not more than one in five of the applicants for cottages ask for cottages on the outskirts of the city. From this remark of his, occurring as it does in the course of an argument in favour of the Corporation method, one might fairly gather that one in five of the applicants for cottages wants them on the outskirts. Now, if one in five, or even one in ten, of the slum dwellers were moved out to the suburbs would not the congestion of the slums be immensely relieved?…Moreover, as to the statement that only one-fifth of the applications are for suburban cottages, it must be remembered that the applicants probably had in mind the present state of transit facilities.
They imagined, probably, that if they were housed at Crumlin or Finglas they would have to walk in and out of town every day; whereas it can be fairly assumed that an improvement of the means of transit would be made concurrently with the building of houses on the outskirts, and that cheap working-class tram fares would be available on these new lines. It is therefore not improbable that if such improved transit conditions were proposed to the people that a larger number than one in five would prefer cottages at some distance from the centre of the city.
The method chosen, and still being followed, by the Housing Committee is one which inflicts great injury, physical and moral, on the poor. The members of the Committee must have adverted to this, for this is precisely the excuse they urged when charged before the 1914 Housing Inquiry with their neglect to carry out their own sanitary by-laws. They argued that had they done so, the landlords, finding their property unprofitable, would have closed it down and thus have inflicted great hard ships on the tenants. This solicitude for the tenants has, therefore, been advanced as a good excuse for lenity to the slum owners, but has not induced the Corporation to provide dwellings for tenants driven out of levelled slum sites, nor induced it to compensate – as by law it could the tenants thus evicted.
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