In 1936, Robert Collis wrote as follows to the Irish Press:
Dubliners are wont to describe their city affectionately as ‘an old lady’. When visitors admire her outer garments — the broad streets, the old eighteenth-century houses, Fitzwilliam Square and St Stephen’s Green — they smile complacently and feel proud. Lift the hem of her outer silken garment, however, and you will find suppurating ulcers covered by stinking rags, for Dublin has the foulest slums of any town in Europe. Into these ‘quaint old eighteenth-century houses’ the people are herded and live in conditions of horror.
Collis was a young paediatrician recently returned to his native city after a distinguished early career abroad. He was from a well-known professional family, mainly medical although his father was a solicitor. Indeed his father is mentioned obliquely in Ulysses as the principal of the firm of Collis & Ward, which employs Simon Dedalus’ despised brother-in-law, Richie Goulding, ‘the drunken little cost drawer’.
Dr Collis was addressing a scandal that had gripped Dublin for over a century and that was only then, in the 1930s, being addressed properly. As early as 1805 a heroic clergyman, Rev. James Whitelaw, had produced a report based on his many visitations to the homes of the poor. In stark terms, he described scenes of hopeless poverty and ill-health: incredible overcrowding, with sometimes even single rooms being sub-divided to provide a minimal and miserable living space; the complete absence of any sanitary clearance system; dung heaps — for human and animal waste alike — and rubbish middens in enclosed back yards; open sewers; the noxious or filthy by-products of commercial activities like lime-kilns.
The early-nineteenth-century city was still small, almost wholly contained within the two canals. In this limited space, the population had risen to more than 200,000 people. Even with growing social segregation, wealth and poverty were uncomfortably close. Wealth demanded servants, who could carry infectious diseases from the slums to the homes of the mighty.
The Liberties was an area that had been largely untouched by eighteenth-century splendour. It was here that Whitelaw found the very worst conditions. In 1818, he described ‘many large houses, consisting of a number of rooms; each of these rooms is let to separate tenants, who again re-let them to as many individuals as they can contain, each person paying for that portion of the floor which his extended body can occupy’.
The very worst of the public health hazards described so memorably by Whitelaw were alleviated by Victorian public works systems, especially the Vartry water scheme and the sewerage system (see chapter 34). But the problem of overcrowding in wretched tenement buildings persisted. Nearly all of these houses had been built as elegant town houses for the eighteenth-century rich. They had long since fallen into decay, being abandoned by their original owners as Dublin’s fortunes declined after the Act of Union, and were now owned by rentiers whose principal concern was to squeeze as much income as possible from them, and from the wretched tenants shoe-horned into them. Some of these slum landlords were members of Dublin Corporation, which gave the city authorities minimal incentive to tackle the scandal of the slums. Moreover, the limited local government franchise meant that well-to-do business and property interests could exercise a disproportionate influence on the Corporation.
As with the Famine, ideology also played its part. The rights of property were asserted with religious conviction: private property was sacrosanct because it represented the surest barrier to the tyranny of the state by securing the autonomy of free individuals. This was neither a stupid nor a wicked view, but its elevation into a sort of fetish in Victorian times frustrated all efforts to involve public bodies and public money in addressing slum clearance. People close to the problem, like Sir Charles Cameron, the long-serving Medical Officer of Health for the city, had persistently called for the direct involvement of public agencies, including the state itself, but this remained a taboo until the end of British rule.
Nor was it just a British taboo. Most leading nationalists shared this belief in the sanctity of private property. Universal male suffrage did not arrive until 1918. Prior to that date, and despite a number of Reform Acts that widened the franchise, only 5.6 million out of a total British population of 36 million had the vote. It was effectively confined to rate-paying property owners and the more substantial tenants. Women, like the poor, were excluded entirely. This meant that the political class came from and appealed to the prosperous minority.
Moreover, the politicians looked to their own interests. William Field, a Dublin Parnellite MP from 1892 until 1918, was also chairman of the Victuallers’ Association and the Cattle Traders’ Association. These meat trade lobbies were active in opposing all attempts by public health bodies to regulate their trade. Diseased meat was sold to the poor. In 1870 alone, the public health authorities seized 400,000 lbs of diseased meat intended for sale. Indeed, the increasing activity of these authorities in the second half of the nineteenth century is one of the reasons Field and others established their trade associations, and used their considerable political muscle to frustrate all attempts at regulation and supervision of their activities. Field was not a wicked man, just a man of his times.
Nor were the meat interests alone in this. Milk suppliers regularly adulterated their product with water, often drawn from contaminated sources like the canals. Brewers watered their beer but then added narcotic chemicals to give it the required kick. All these mercantile interests shared a belief in the sacred inviolability of private property — thus their hostility to regulation — and simply did not have the mental and imaginative resources to address the slum problem.
Private Victorian initiatives such as the Dublin Artisans’ Dwelling Company and the Guinness Trust, while successful in themselves, left the greater part of the problem untouched. It was not until the new state took a direct hand in the matter in the 1920s and 1930s that real progress started to be made. The beautifully laid-out Marino estate on the north side was a product of the 1920s. On the south side, Crumlin, bigger than Marino and less successful visually and architecturally, was none the less a blessing for families who had hitherto faced nothing other than exorbitant rents in squalid city centre tenements. Nearby, Drimnagh was also developed as a public housing estate in a similar fashion, as were Cabra and Finglas on the north side. This all meant the commitment of public funds on a lavish scale, an achievement all the more meritorious for the fact that the state was poor.
The effect was that the twentieth century and an independent government managed to resolve the biggest social problem that had defeated the nineteenth-century British administration. Other forces helped, not least Catholic lay organisations like the Legion of Mary, whose Marian ardour was offended by the widespread prostitution in the city and which campaigned successfully to close the Monto town. They saw the overcrowded slums as a breeding ground for vice: a by-product of their zeal was the increased political pressure which the Catholic church — by now in a position of uncontested moral authority in the country — could bring to bear on government.
