Hugh Linehan: To understand Dublin’s current problems, you must understand its past

This week brought dispiriting but unsurprising news about the snail’s pace at which transport infrastructure for Dublin will be rolled out over the coming decades. It comes on top of a housing crisis born of years of political ineptitude and capitulation to vested interests, and a highly limited view of what the role and function of a modern city centre could be, as expressed in recent planning decisions. Why has the capital been so ill-served by successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats? And could it have been done better?

If you want to understand the historical context and scale of the challenge facing 21st-century Dublin in the age of climate crisis, a good place to start is with Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs. Ruth McManus’s groundbreaking book, first published in 2002, has just been released in a new, updated edition, complete with improved maps and a verse foreword by Dermot Bolger.

The systematic provision of what we now call social housing, first by charitable and philanthropic associations and later by local authorities such as Dublin Corporation, has been rightly cited as one of the achievements of the early State. Understandably, that success has been contrasted with the more recent failures which have led to the current housing crisis. But, as McManus’s book makes clear, the story is more nuanced than that. It took a very long time for Dublin to start addressing its problems. And many of the political struggles of the early 20th-century city reflect deeply contested visions of what a city could and should be, divisions which echo down to the present day.

Secular martyr

Bolger’s new foreword frames Dublin Corporation’s housing architect Herbert Simms as a secular martyr (he took his own life at the age of 50 in 1948). Simms’s internationalist legacy is still visible across Dublin, from the inner-city flat complexes of Cook Street to the modernist shelters of the Clontarf seafront. His background – English, working-class, influenced by building styles from the Netherlands and elsewhere – inevitably ran up against the ideological conservatism, petty snobberies and commercial interests of the day. A recurring theme of the book is the institutional resistance to anything aesthetically ambitious - the multiple house designs and ample green spaces of Marino would not be replicated in later estates; the hipped roofs and curved corners of Cumberland Street flats were dispensed with for other complexes.

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“You stamped an indelible imprint on Dublin city,” writes Bolger. “But get rarely remembered on this or any other street/ So allow me to pause a moment outside your door/ You departed from on your final morning alive/ Burdened by so much unfinished work to be done/ So many dwellings to design, yet acutely aware/ They would still never be enough to house the poor/ And ease Dublin’s relentlessly unsolvable problems.”

Great ruptures

The story of urban Ireland in the first half of the 20th century runs parallel to, yet separate from, the great ruptures that were unfolding at the same time and now largely dominate our sense of the period: insurrection, revolution, civil war, independence and partition. The project of slum clearance, the influential (and British) concept of the “garden suburb” which informed much of the urban planning of the day, contemporary European ideas of a modern apartment-dwelling city – all of these came into conflict with a State whose conception of its own identity privileged the rural over the urban and whose ideology was particularly suspicious of organised labour and other forms of class-based politics. You can draw a direct line from all of this to the low-rise city we have today, whose only electrified urban rail line runs on a piece of infrastructure most of which was built before Charles Dickens became famous.

As they approach their centenaries, these formerly peripheral suburbs of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s are now almost part of the inner core of a city which splays out across hundreds of square kilometres. Some of us had the chance during lockdown to become more familiar with the quirks of their different designs and layouts, and Dublin, 1910-1940 answers many questions about how those came about. But the book also stands as an affirmation of the value of good urban planning and leadership in a place which has not seen enough of either.

It remains to be seen whether the twin challenges of providing homes for its citizens and meeting binding carbon targets are within the capabilities of the current national and local administrations. Sadly, recent evidence suggests not.

Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs is published by Four Courts Press