We seem to have been in some form of housing crisis since the inception of the State, with each successive government playing catch-up and never quite succeeding.
I was curious to find out about the origins of our current crisis. My search took me all the way back to the establishment of the Free State. Riven with poverty, our nation was faced with a housing emergency, aspects of which were so wonderfully depicted on TV in Strumpet City, the late Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of James Plunkett’s historical novel.
Prompted by the need to provide for its people and to stave off social unrest, the government of the day devised a plan to provide decent and affordable housing. The solution to the then housing crisis was the grandly titled Million Pound Scheme, which funded the construction of more than 2,000 local-authority homes across the country.
Garden-city schemes, such as those in Marino, on the northside of Dublin, were developed with a view to moving a poorly housed populace out of urban slums into spacious suburban settings. These new homes were healthy and sustainable by design, with plenty of windows to let in natural light and fresh air, large gardens in which to relax, and room left over to grow vegetables and keep a couple of chickens. There was often a piggery close by, for the disposal of food waste, and a local dairy, supplying fresh produce.
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At the same time, there were visionaries such as Herbert Simms. Appointed on a temporary basis in 1925 and then formally in 1932 by Dublin Corporation as the city’s first housing architect, he designed fabulous residential complexes that remain with us, such as Chancery Place, behind the Four Courts; Henrietta House, on Henrietta Place by the King’s Inns, and Ballybough House, near Annesley Bridge in Ballybough, in north Dublin.
His projects are instantly recognisable by their beautiful curves, decorative features and strong art-deco influences. He was greatly influenced by the public housing of the day in Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and by the best of what was being built in England. Sadly, Simms, dedicated so completely to his work, took his own life at the age of 49, leaving a note to say he felt overworked and overwhelmed.
[ A century of housing: How the State built Ireland’s homesOpens in new window ]
In 1939, 41 per cent of our housing stock was being built by our local authorities. The outbreak of the second World War that year saw housing delivery stall through much of the following decade. This situation largely persisted until the next big housing-delivery programme, in the 1960s and 1970s.
The early 1960s saw a new housing crisis. Tragically, it took the death of four people in the collapse of two tenement buildings, on Bolton Street and Fenian Street in central Dublin, in June 1963 to exercise the powers that be sufficiently to bring an end to our slums.
The future, it seemed, was to be found in the new, innovative system-builds and high-rise solutions that had, apparently, proven successful across Europe and the United States. Based on Le Corbusier’s model of the “Towers in the Park”, these high-rise blocks were built by the newly established National Building Agency, and because of the speed of their construction they were hailed as a success. It didn’t take long for these solutions to become a problem. With insufficient local amenities, management or maintenance, these estates fell into serious disrepair.
The problem is that no single authority is tasked with delivering the social and affordable homes we need in a structured and value-driven manner. It’s high time to bring responsibility for the delivery of housing back under the auspices of local government
Through the 1970s and 1980s the building of social homes stagnated once more. At the same time local authorities sold off more than half of their existing housing stock to tenants and others for what today we would consider as exceptionally low prices.
The government of the day took an arm’s-length approach to housing policy, leaving the provision of new homes to private developers right until the catastrophic collapse of the Celtic Tiger, in 2008. With the private sector on its knees, the State now had no one left to turn to to provide new homes for its population.
Since then we’ve had three general elections and four housing ministers drawn, respectively, from Labour, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil promoting various strategies to tackle our now decade-long housing crisis. The latest numbers from the Department of Housing, show that 10,805 people are recorded as being homeless while demand for new homes continues to outstrip supply.
So what’s the problem when the State has the financial firepower and a plethora of mechanisms, including approved housing bodies, private developers, local authorities and the Land Development Agency, to deliver housing? The problem is that no single authority is tasked with delivering the large numbers of social and affordable homes we need in a structured and value-driven manner. It’s high time for us to bring the responsibility for the delivery of housing back under the auspices of local government, with their collective efforts co-ordinated by a new national strategic planning executive.
I’d like to thank my colleague Eryk Rawicz-Lipinski for his contribution to the writing of this article, taken from his paper Modernism for the Masses: The Case of Dublin’s Social Housing
