of £2.58 million in house construction of which £1.07 million went to private individuals. By 1932 Local Authorities had provided an additional 10,000 homes while private builders had delivered 16,500. In Dublin City, where need for Council housing was highest, the Local Authority provided a meagre 483 units a year over the decade. According to O’Connell, ‘two thirds of all houses built with State aid were in private ownership’.21
However, as with the housing funded under the million pound scheme, both the rural and urban housing funded through the various housing acts of the 1920s benefited small farmers and the artisan working class. The State’s first Taoiseach, W.T. Cosgrave, made clear that Government had no intention of seeking to address the housing problems of the poorest in society. He told a Dáil debate in 1925 that doing so would require the provision of 70,000 homes at a cost of £14 million. A cost he clearly felt was prohibitive.22
Despite the fact that tens of thousands of families continued to live in the most appalling conditions in the cities and towns it would not be until the 1930s that social action and civic concern would force the political system to act.
The 1920s did, however, generate one of the first sustained debates about the issue of town planning and whether the solution to the poor housing conditions in the urban centres lay in the building of new suburbs. Civic surveys for Cork and Dublin were published in 1922 and 1923. The Dublin report described the housing situation is Dublin as a ‘tragedy’, stating:
Its conditions cause either a rapid or slow death. Rapid when the houses fall upon the tenants, as has already happened, slow when they remain standing dens of insanitation.23
The survey warned that the tenements were at risk of spreading and urged the rehousing of 60,000 people to new housing developments in the suburbs. O’Connell notes that the survey’s findings were strongly supported by the officials in Dublin Corporation but that political support was less than forthcoming.
Cumann an nGaedhael TD John Good summed up the thinking of Government at the time when he argued that
housing is an economic problem which could only be solved by putting it on an economic basis … we must learn in the Free State to rely more on ourselves and less on the Government and to try and earn what we want by honest work.24
In what was to become an almost universal myopia in successive Government thinking, exchequer subsidies were acceptable and supplied in great volume where housing was to be provided for private ownership but the call for similar subsidies to lift society’s poorest families from the most appalling living conditions was seemingly unthinkable.
O’Connell concludes that
the thrust of housing legislation throughout the 1920’s had only a marginal effect on alleviating the dire living conditions of the poorest urban households. The greatest benefits accrued to the middle class and better off working class households whose incomes allowed them to avail of the subsidies contained in the various housing acts of the new Irish state.25
This was a far cry from the founding policy document of the Irish Republic, the 1919 Democratic Programme. One of the very first acts of the newly established First Dáil was to assert that it shall
be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provisions for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children to ensure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter …26
The gap between the rhetoric and reality of the new Republic was to become the key battle ground in the general election that brought Cumann an nGaedhael’s first decade in power to an end in 1931. It would also be the measure against which working-class communities and their trade union and political representatives would judge the new Fianna Fáil Government of Éamon de Valera.
New Government, Similar Policy
The final years of W.T. Cosgrave’s Government were marked by growing social unrest, in part fuelled by the failure of his administration to address the social and economic needs of large sections of society. Fianna Fáil’s entry to Government in 1931, assisted by a more assertive Labour Party and grass roots campaigning by radical republicans, was as much on a promise of addressing the issues of unemployment and poor housing as it was on broader constitutional issues such as partition. Indeed, leading radicals within the party such as Constance Markievicz urged their colleagues to ensure that politics ‘was more about the organisation of food, clothing and housing’ than which leader to mobilise under.27
While the final Housing Act of Cumann na nGaedhael in 1931, provoked by a particularly damning Dublin Corporation Housing report of the same year, finally opened the way for subsidies to provide housing for lower-income families, it was the first housing act of the new Fianna Fáil Government that made such developments genuinely viable.
The 1932 Act provided additional funds to Local Authorities to offset the loan costs of rehousing those cleared from slums or for lower-income urban or rural workers. The new facility meant that rents could be sent at a less than economic cost enabling lower-income families access to housing.
The legislation still prioritised development by private individuals and Public Utility Societies and as with its predecessors was more focused on rural labourers than their urban counterparts. Over the following eight years 17,525 cottages were provided for rural labourers, despite only 10,000 being required. Meanwhile less than half the 19,000 urban dwellings required in Dublin were built.28 In total 99,000 homes were provided under the terms of the act with 56,000 in private ownership.29
The increasing reliance on private loan finance started to encounter problems as Irish banks, operating as a cartel, increasingly set prohibitive interest rates. In response Government expanded the availability of their Local Loans Fund to cover housing, though neither Cork nor Dublin cities were eligible despite having the greatest need.
One of the immediate consequences of the freeing up of credit was to see the number of Small Dwelling Acquisitions Scheme builds and purchases dramatically increase. In the scheme’s first four decades 2,102 mortgages were issued. In the following decade 4,648 homes were purchased with the loan.
While Fianna Fáil made much of what they called their ‘Housing Drive’ others were less than convinced. Housing activism, led by the Republic Congress, the Communist Party and others gathered pace throughout the 1930s. A series of proposed evictions for rent arrears in Council housing in Dublin provoked widespread anger and the formation of the Municipal Tenants Association. Rent arrears and consequent rent strikes once again highlighted the problem that economic rents, set to allow Local Authorities to repay their loans, were too high for low-income families, especially when faced with economic downturns.
There was also growing disquiet at the emerging relationship between building contractors and the new Fianna Fáil Government. J.J. Lee notes that
The housing programme naturally provided grist to the pockets of the contractors. Fortunes were made in the field more easily than manufacturing. The building industry soon came to be widely regarded as an extension of the Fianna Fáil patronage system.30
Though Lee did acknowledge that, irrespective of the motivations behind the building expansion, ‘the new dwellings were a marked improvement on the foul slums that for so long had disgraced Dublin and other cities’.31
Notwithstanding these concerns, output of Government-funded housing significantly increased during the 1930s. In the decade from 1932 an average of 12,000 houses were built annually of which half were Council homes, compared to an average of just 2,000 per year under the previous administration. However, from the early 1940s this dropped off significantly as fiscal constraints and the disruption to the supply of building materials caused by the Second
