On November 23rd, 1913, the Parisian newspaper Le Miroir carried a large photograph of two young boys sleeping on the street in the doorway of a well-appointed shop. Their legs are intertwined – one of them has boots on but the smaller boy has bare feet. The scene is not Paris. The caption says: La Misère à Dublin. The housing crisis in the Irish capital had acquired international notoriety.
Even by the standards of a century ago, it was scandalous that children should be homeless and that whole families had to live in single rooms. The existence of such squalor was a disgrace – to the British authorities and to the Irish Party politicians who dominated local government. For those who wanted to break the connection with London and establish an independent Irish state, nothing discredited the establishment quite as thoroughly as its inability to provide decent housing for families and in particular for children.
When a public inquiry into Dublin housing convened around the same time as Le Miroir published that photograph, Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin, condemned it as a typical exercise in British evasion: "It will sit for a number of days, continue not to put the essential questions, and report to order."
‘British government’
“The report will recommend that ‘the state’ should provide a million or a million and a half for urban housing in Ireland, and while Dublin waits for the provision – which will never be made by the present British government – [the chief secretary]
Mr Birrell
will enjoy his success in evading a troublesome question by the oldest of Castle devices.”
The spectacle of an administration dithering and hiding behind reports and inquiries while thousands of people lived in inhuman conditions was, for people like Griffith, symptomatic of the irredeemable failure of British rule. Even after the State was established, the Dublin slums could still be blamed on the Brits. The Irish Press wrote in October 1936, for example, that they were "a legacy of alien rule".
The disgrace now, however, is all ours. Ireland, and in particular Dublin, is rapidly recreating some of the conditions that seemed so revolting a century ago. The scale is not the same, of course. But the phenomenon that struck people back then as being so outrageous – whole families with children forced to live in single rooms – is back with a vengeance.
Right now, as the Children's Rights Alliance pointed out last week in its important report to the United Nations, Are We There Yet? at least 3,000 children in the State are living in temporary, emergency accommodation. This strips them of the freedom, dignity and security that every child needs and deserves.
Half of these children are asylum seekers; the other half are simply homeless in their own country. The number of children being made homeless is rising with appalling rapidity. In January, 539 families with children had to go into emergency accommodation. By August, that had increased to 959. In May, we had 1,054 homeless children. By September, we had 1,496. At least 40 new families with children are being made homeless every month. What does this mean for a child? It means living, as so many children did a century ago, in a single room with your parents. In some ways, you are undoubtedly much better off than you would have been back then – heat, clothing, sanitation and nutrition are vastly improved.
Tenement families
But in other respects, you might be worse off. A room in a Georgian tenement was probably bigger and brighter than a room in a cheap hotel or B&B. Tenement families could cook and eat their own meals – families in B&Bs can’t. Tenement children could go outside and play – photographs from the time show gangs of kids in their own worlds on the street. Children in emergency accommodation often can’t even do that – there’s no room to play indoors and no safe place to go outside.
Tenement children lived very close to their schools – many children are being placed in emergency accommodation miles from their schools, so that, as well as all the other stress in their lives, they have to travel long distances in order to maintain the one aspect of continuity they have.
How can we celebrate 1916 while we are reproducing some of the conditions that made the Rising, in many people's eyes, a moral necessity? How can we celebrate a State that creates and tolerates the squalor that delegitimised its predecessor? How can Fine Gael, which sees itself as the party of Arthur Griffith, indulge in the same kind of delay, dithering and "evading a troublesome question" he blamed Dublin Castle for in 1913?
We no longer have the comfort of the "legacy of alien rule". Focus Ireland predicts that, without rent certainty and an increase in rent supplement, a further 1,500 children will become homeless in 2016. Are we really going to hold our heads high and wave the Tricolour while that is happening? Maybe getting rid of the Brits was not such a great idea – if they were still in charge we could say that if only we had our own state this intolerable abuse of children would not be tolerated.