homes with more than five rooms and windows, and the very wealthy 2 percent of society who lived in absolute luxury whether in the big country houses or Georgian city homes.2
The Great Hunger from 1845, between starvation and emigration, wiped out huge swathes of the rural population. In the decade up to 1851 the number of single room mud cabins fell by a dramatic 355,689 or 71 percent of the pre-famine total.3 Alongside the swelling numbers of people in graveyards and coffin ships, the famine saw a dramatic shift of people to the cities and towns.
The intolerable conditions of the rural poor sparked decades of agrarian protest, first in the form of localised societies such as Whiteboys and Ribbonmen. Aggrieved at maltreatment by landlords and their agents these secret organisations took their revenge in the dead of night, maiming or driving cattle, damaging property or, worse still, taking life.
The rage of rural Ireland found expression in the writings of radicals such as James Fintan Lalor during the 1840s, Charles Gavin Duffy’s Tenant Right League of the 1850s and the failed Fenian rebellion of 1867.
But it was the Land League founded by former Fenian Michael Davitt with the support of leading nationalist politicians including Charles Stewart Parnell that galvanised these disparate expressions of discontent into a truly national movement.
The league combined mass meetings, boycotts and rent strikes in its campaign to improve the lot of tenant farmers and ultimately to secure the abolition of landlordism. While opposed to violence, agrarian reprisals against landlords continued to form part of the backdrop of what was to become known as the Land War.
The movement went beyond the calls for fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale, arguing that the land issue could only be finally resolved through widescale tenant proprietorship. This core demand became the focus of a four-year campaign during which the Land League opposed evictions and rent increases while attempting to secure legislative reform in Westminster.
Concerned by the rising levels of political and social agitation, the British Government eventually responded with a series of land reforms which over the next decades redistributed huge tracts of rural Ireland from landlords to tenant farmers.
The Kilmainham Treaty settlement between Parnell and Gladstone may have demobilised the movement and angered the radicals, Davitt included, but its outcome was to prove as important to the development of Irish society in the twentieth century as many of the better known historical events.
Land Reform and Rural Housing
While the 1870 Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act sought to quell the rising tide of rural protest, its measures were weak and outpaced by events. It was not until the 1881 Land Act that real reform got underway. In the two decades that followed, seven significant pieces of land legislation passed through Westminster.4
The Land Act increased tenants’ security of tenure, established a Land Court to deal with disputes and fix rents for fifteen-year terms, and set up a Land Commission backed with loans to assist a tenant purchase scheme. This was followed by the 1882 Arrears of Rent (Ireland) Act which gave grants to 100,000 tenants to clear their arrears, a condition of access to both the Land Court and Commission.
The year 1885 brought in the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act providing the equivalent of €5 million in long-term loans for tenant purchase with a second round of loans to the same value provided for in the 1887 Land Purchase Act. The 1891 Land Purchase Act provided the equivalent of a further €33 million in 100 percent loans followed in 1903 with another round of loans repayable over sixty-eight years. Compulsory acquisition powers were granted in the 1909 Land Act specifically to relieve congestion.
Padraic Kenna notes that prior to the enactment of this raft of legislation ‘13,000 landlords owned and controlled the whole rural area of Ireland’ while by 1920 ‘316,000 holdings were purchased by tenants on some 11.5 million acres … Some 750,000 acres were also distributed to 35,000 allottees, and 10,000 holdings were created from intermixed or rundale lands, mainly through the Congested Districts Board.’5
Alongside land reform, political pressure from the Land League and Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster forced the Government to introduce a series of Labourers Acts in 1883, 1885, 1891 and 1896. These provided loans for the provision of rural cottages for farmers. There were 16,000 such cottages constructed by 1900 with a total of 36,000 provided for by 1914. In many instances the State subsidised the loans used by labourers to purchase these dwellings by as much as 36 percent.6
The legacy of the Land League was to transform land ownership in Ireland to such an extent that half a million rural families became private land- and homeowners. It undoubtedly improved the quality of life for those involved, giving them permanent security of tenure over their homes and farming livelihoods. In the 1840s just 17 percent of tenant farmers lived in houses with five or more rooms. By 1901 the number had increased to a dramatic 56 percent.7 By 1911 just 1 percent of tenant farmers lived in what was then classified as fourth class dwellings.8 However, inequalities in access to secure and affordable accommodation persisted.
Landless labourers benefited little if at all from this massive redistribution. While their numbers declined by more than half during the final decades of the nineteenth century, they remained a significant presence in rural Ireland. However, their campaigning demands were more often than not for better wages rather than improved housing and their future in many instances lay in migration into the towns and cities. And it was here that the real inequalities in housing conditions were to be found.
Urban Housing
Cathal O’Connell notes that an 1861 Dublin Corporation report found a third of all houses within the city boundary were tenements.9 Fifty thousand people lived in just 8,000 dwellings in ‘fetid and poisonous conditions’. A flood of destitute migrants from the countryside followed the years of famine as Cork, Limerick and smaller towns saw their populations swell.
The immediate response was the public inquiry where Government bodies or philanthropic societies studied the conditions of the urban poor: 1865 saw the creation of Dublin Corporation’s Public Health Committee with its first report published the following year; 1880 saw the publication of the Commission of Inquiry into sewage and drainage in Dublin, with a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Working Class Housing five years later; 1900 saw a report on high mortality rates in Dublin with a second report on the same subject six years later.
The 1885 Royal Commission found 32,000 families living in just 7,200 houses in Dublin. Almost 60 percent of the city’s population was living in tenements. Meanwhile 22,000 people were crammed into 1,731 tenement buildings in Cork.
This substantial body of evidence confirmed time and again the squalid conditions of the urban working class. Chronic overcrowding, debilitating poverty, disease and high adult and infant mortality were widespread. Private landlords, driven by greed, had no qualms about putting their tenants’ lives, let alone health and safety, at risk.
In response, Government passed the Labouring Classes (Lodging Houses and Dwellings) Act in 1866 providing loans to cover half the cost of providing housing for the poor. Take up was limited. Some philanthropic societies and private companies did enter the fray. The Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company was founded in 1876 by prominent businesspeople to house the poor. Through a mixture of private loans and State subsidies it provided 3,600 homes.10
Other prominent providers included the Industrial Tenements Company, the Peabody Trust, the Guinness Trust and the Sutton Housing Trust. While some were purely commercial enterprises others had a social reforming zeal. The Iveagh Trust, which still houses social tenants in Dublin’s Liberties today, is possibly the best known of these, combining housing with baths, markets and social activities for children focused on educational and moral improvement.
In
