Authorities for services, various tax measures and nationalisation. The report stated a clear preference for the compulsory purchase of private land in high demand areas at original use value plus 25 percent of the uplift expected from residential zoning.
The land could then either be used for social housing or sold on to developers at below market prices for private development.
The recommendations of the report were never implemented. Land price inflation, and with it house price inflation, remained a significant problem in the housing system. Subsequent generations of policy-makers would return time and again to the same debate as a housing boom would re-present the very same problems as those which the Fianna Fail Government of the late 1960s and Fine Gael–Labour Government of the early 1970s failed to address.
While social housing output expanded significantly during the 1970s private ownership raced ahead. The decade saw private sector building increase threefold, and Government placed ever greater emphasis on subsidising private homeownership through grants and tenant purchase. A further 59,566 Council homes were sold at significant discounts to tenants in that decade, almost the same number as new Council homes built by Local Authorities.
Housing in the 1970s, a White Paper published in 1969, once again emphasised the State’s preference for owner-occupation on both social and economic grounds. According to Kenna, a National Economic and Social Council research paper published later in the decade confirmed that ‘in 1975, the aggregate proportionate subsidisation of owner-occupiers was greater than that of local authority tenants’.45
In the same year social housing hit what was to be its highest ever level of output at 8,800. Never again was the State to produce as many Council homes in a single year. Indeed, through the 1970s and early 80s social housing output never fell below 20 percent of total housing output with the single exception of 1981.
Finally, after half a century the Southern State was finally getting to grips with current housing need and providing a sufficient supply of both private and public homes to meet the vast majority of demand. The slums had been cleared, waiting lists were small and short. Norris described this period as ‘the saturation phase’, as during
this period, the land project was extended to its furthest practicable limits and public subsidisation of homeownership was extended from the rural population to the urban middle class (via subsidies such as grants and rates remission and local government loans) and also to the working class in the cities (via the extension of tenant purchase of social housing.46
While there is no doubt that between the end of the Emergency and the early 1970s the housing need of ever growing sections of Irish society was being met, including that of lower-income families, other groups in society continued to be left behind.
Government policy and legislation was still blind to those with no homes at all. As a result, students in Trinity College Dublin founded the first Irish branch of the Simon Communities in 1969. Inspired by the pioneering work of Anton Wallich-Clifford, who founded the Simon Communities in London in 1963, the group aimed to highlight the plight of rough sleepers and those without any accommodation and to provide on a voluntary basis some form of emergency accommodation.
The other group who remained invisible to official Ireland was the Travelling Community. While the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963 brought the issue of Travellers into the mainstream of policy debate it did so by seeking to eradicate the nomadic culture of Travellers by forcing them into settled housing. The move failed and simply forced Travellers into illegal occupation of roadside camps.
It would take several decades before Government policy and legislation even started to grapple with the issues of homelessness and Traveller-appropriate accommodation in any serious way.
As is so often the case public opinion was more alert to the contradictions evident in the proximity of continued acute housing need with a construction boom and dramatically rising land values. Alongside radical left republican campaigns for better housing were increasingly vocal social justice advocates from within the faith communities. Logos, a left-wing catholic group active on housing issues, was founded by John Feeney. A Dominican priest, Fr Ferghal O’Connor, founded Ally, a housing charity for single parents.
Priests were also using their influence in broadcasting to highlight housing inequalities much to the ire of the Government. A 1968 broadcast of the RTÉ show Outlook edited by Fr Austin Flannery, featured a discussion on the housing issue with the Jesuit Michael Sweetman and Communist Party of Ireland spokesperson Michael O’Riordan. The Minister for Local Government accused Flannery of an ‘abuse of privilege’ by a ‘so called cleric’ while the Minister for Finance and future Taoiseach Charles Haughey dismissed the priest as ‘gullible’. The very public spat continued into the pages of the week’s newspapers with a formal rebuttal from Flannery in the Evening Herald. For his efforts in highlighting the plight of those not served by Government housing policy the Garda Special Branch allocated an officer to sit in studio for every future Flannery-produced show.47
Conclusion
The politics of housing provision from 1870 to the early 1970s displays a number of dynamics that shaped and continues to shape the Irish housing system into the twenty-first century.
There is a cycle that starts with intolerable conditions: urban and rural poverty, insecurity of tenure, high rents and illegal evictions. The everyday inequality and unfairness of the housing system reaches some tipping point in the form of famine, disease or building collapse, all of which involve death.
Frustration and anger turn to social mobilisation whether through the Land League, trade union movement or Housing Action Committees. People at the sharp edge of a bad, abnormal, difficult, dysfunctional housing system mobilise in their tens of thousands in rural Ireland and their thousands in the cities and towns.
In turn politicians, both honest and expedient, take notice and join the fray, passing motions and lobbying for legislative change. Under pressure in parliament and facing the very real potential for social revolt and the collapse of public order Government responds in a slow and piecemeal fashion.
The pace of reform is determined by the strength of the social mobilisation and the coherence of the organisations through which those most affected organise their efforts.
Progress in land reform and rural housing at the turn of the century far outstripped change in urban Ireland because the size and strength of the land movement was so much greater than their urban counterparts.
However, what is more striking than the disparity between urban and rural housing policy during the first half of the twentieth century is the underlying principle guiding both, namely promoting owner-occupation.
Almost all of the legislative and policy responses to housing need, first by Westminster and then the Free State Government, were based on a single principle, private ownership. Land purchase, rural cottages and even some urban charitable and public housing would be owned by the tenants purchased through low interest, long-term loans.
It is remarkable that by 1914 Government had provided 45,000 homes, 82 percent in rural areas, through various loan schemes. In Britain, the Government had built a mere 24,000. But whereas in twentieth-century Britain public housing would predominantly be Council owned, in Ireland the State was less eager to take up the role of landlord. Rather it saw its function as assisting working people, both rural and urban, is accessing credit to own their own homes.
While funding for the provision of subsidised housing for the very poor would start to emerge before partition, in reality it was not until 1932 that public housing delivered by Local Authorities would become a significant feature of the housing system.
Even
