This is the time of year when foreign ambassadors here blink in amazement at the arrival of the IPA Yearbook. What in other countries would require the energies of a dozen of their best and most sedulous intelligence agents working round the clock for a year to discover is there before them, all within a single volume. It must make their eyes water with joy. It is one of the great little flowers of this civilisation, and I had always assumed it was unique to the Institute of Public Administration.
But recently I came across a copy of the Post Office Dublin Directory for 1935, and in fact it was doing in those days largely what the IPA does today. There can hardly be a more revealing social document than this directory, telling us tales about Ireland in that lost and largely forgotten era. Historians who stray into this decade with reference to the Post Office Directory enter a desert without a compass.
Of course, on the first page it recites the moveable feasts of the year, not out of an ancient and habitual piety but because they were dates around which much of the secular year moved in those days. The Ireland of then was a society of profound religious observance. Religion and religious institutions filled people's lives and a huge number of organisations were run on congregational or confessional grounds.
"Respectable, reduced"
What happened to them? What happened to the Old Men's Home, which "provides a comfortable home for 28 respectable, reduced, aged Protestant men of good character"? What happened to Simpson's Hospital, for similar men suffering from gout or want of sight, or the Mageough Home for Aged Females "for the habitation, support and clothing of aged females professing the Protestant faith, and of good character and sobriety"? The Albert Retreat for Aged Protestant females "provides house, coal, light and medical care for about 30 Protestant women, each of whom should have a guaranteed income of not less than 7s. a week for her own support."
We know something now some of the other institutions mentioned in the directory. The Protestant institution under the care of the Honourable Mrs Plunkett in Leeson Street baldly declared that it was a home for unmarried mothers - the godless heretics. Fortunately, for the sake of the immortal souls of their charges, the Catholic homes hit just the right tone: the Magdalen Asylum in Gloucester Street sternly observed that it provided for 130 "pentitents". The asylum in Donnybrook was for 100 "penitents" - "who contribute to their support by washing and needlework."
It is by such glimpses into human misery that we can understand the vast mass of misery and economic deprivation in Ireland then. The Free Night Shelter for Catholic Men had 200 beds. The Dublin Country Air Association existed "to provide rest and fresh air for members of the Protestant poor".
Shifting balance
Protestant, Catholic, Protestant, Catholic. Religion mattered with an intensity that is barely imaginable today, and the Post Office Directory even recorded the shifting population balance, as if sub-consciously aware that this was of importance. The Church of Ireland population of the city fell gradually over the decades: from 16.2 per cent in 1871, to 14.4 per cent in 1891 to 12.9 per cent in 1911; then came an astonishing drop of over 5 percentage points to 7.39 per cent in 1926 (equal to a drop within the Church of Ireland community of over 40 per cent in 15 years).
There were some things to envy in that old cold city of the smoky skies and draughty tenements and horrifying privies shared between a 100 residents. There were only 10,000 motor vehicles in the city and county of Dublin, with some 60 people killed in motor vehicle accidents a year, compared with five killed in accidents involving horse-drawn vehicles, and five involving bicycles.
Lost property, an almost forgotten concept these days, was a real and vital thing then. The return of lost property was an important police duty, and its success was a measure of a now extinct culture of personal honesty. Total losses reported in 1933 came to £13,242; of that £11,228-worth was recovered and returned to the owner. This was a city of night shelters and famished beggary, and one in which a pound note dropped would sooner or later be a pound note found and returned. The past is truly another country.
Vehicles for hire
One figure that is surely of historical and sociological interest is the drastic decline of licensed vehicles for hire after 1917, when outside cars (468) and cabs (419) totalled 837 in number. The figure continued to rise until 1923 and Independence, after which it plummeted drastically from 943 to just 227 in 1933.
No other category of vehicle-for-hire is listed - so could it possibly be that the diminishing availability of taxis (down nearly 70 per cent) signals a serious economic downturn? And if there were over 800 vehicles for hire in 1917, what possible excuse can there be for having fewer than 2,000 taxis today?
The decline of the vehicle-for-hire was not the only sign of a diminishing economy. Between 1926 and 1933, the number of licensed premises - surely an excellent barometer of economic activity - dropped from 736 to 705, as did arrests for drunkenness (in which category women usually outnumbered men).
Yes, 1935 was an interesting world: but this one is better. Happy Christmas, everybody.