FAULTY TOWERS

IT was all so heroic. Ireland was to have its first high rise housing estate in a place called Ballymun, and nearly everyone at the time saw it as another symbol off "progress", to go with Liberty Hall and O'Connell Bridge House. Nobody imagined that it would become the State's biggest housing disaster.

Pre fabricated "system building" was all the rage in the 1960s. Neil Blaney, then Minister for Local Government, was sold on the idea as a fast - and cheap way of solving Dublin's housing crisis, which had been made more pressing by the collapse of a tenement in Fenian Street in 1963 and the subsequent "dangerous buildings" demolition mania.

Claims by the building trade unions that housing could be produced just as quickly by traditional methods were ignored. Ballymun was an idea whose time had come and nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of "Ireland's greatest housing scheme", as it was billed. The National Building Agency was set up with a mandate to oversee its construction.

After Dublin Corporation had acquired 359 acres of land owned by Albert College (the purchase was negotiated by its then chief valuer, Michael Lucey, who later - became property investment manager of Irish Life), the stage was set for Blaney to unveil his daring scheme - ominously enough - on Friday, November 13th, 1964.

Three months later, in February 1965, he signed a record £10 million contract with the Cubitt Haden Sisk consortium to provide a total of 3,068 dwellings - 2,61 6 in system built blocks, of four to 15 storeys in height, and a further 452 in two storey terraces. The first 800 units were to be completed "before 12 months are out", Blaney told the Dail.

Artists' impressions of what it would all look like showed happy, well dressed children in school playgrounds, with trees and tower blocks in the background. It was all so clean and modern, a real counterpoint to the squalor of Dublin's tenements, and the Corporation's tenants were lining up to move in. Ballymun was the place to be.

The whole estate was to be finished in four years, providing much needed housing for at least 12,000 people. Planning of the project, Ireland's first "design and build" package deal, was in the hands of English architects Arthur Swift and Partners, with Scott Tallon Walker as the Irish consultants.

A factory was established on a nearby 20 acre site to produce the pre cast units, using the French Balency system. (It was kept going for a while, even after Blaney's grand project was finished, producing exactly the same units for St Michael's Estate in Inchicore, a "miniature Ballymun" which replaced the notorious slum of Keogh Square).

In May 1966, at the height off nationalist fervour in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Dublin Corporation decided that the seven, 15 storey tower blocks in Ballymun, each of them containing 90 flats, would be named after the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation - a real measure of the contemporary enthusiasm for the project.

Also in 1966, when the Royal Institute of British Architects held its annual conference in Dublin, there was a bus tour of Ballymun to see the mammoth scheme under construction. It would be another two years before high rise housing began to lose its allure, after a gas explosion which caused Ronan Point, in London, to collapse.

Ballymun's completion in December 1968 - seven months after the Ronan Point disaster - was marked by a "simple and stirring ceremony" attended by Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, his successor as Minister for Local Government. Less than three years later, Plan magazine commented: "If Ballymun succeeds, it will be a miracle."

By then, of course, problems were becoming evident. The provision of all sorts of amenities was supposed to go hand in hand with the housing, but this didn't happen. For example, the original plan for the town centre included not just shops, but also a swimming pool, dance hall, bowling alley, restaurant, creche clinic and garda station.

Needless to say, the "town centre" was built without most of these facilities. Grimly functional, it was described by Plan as "a dull, inhuman place without any focal points or features". It would go steadily downhill from there, with Sisk eventually agreeing to carry out a minimalist refurbishment after years of local campaigning.

Then, there were the lifts. In 1970, though the Minister for Local Government, Robert Molloy, said they were of "sophisticated design and robust construction", the lifts were often out of order. In one 12 month period in the late 1970s, the Corporation had to deal with 2,42 5 complaints - due to equipment failures, misuse or vandalism.

As a result, mothers with young children and bags full of shopping have been forced to climb endless concrete stairways to reach flats on the upper floors of the towerblocks and ordeal which would leave even athletes breathless. No wonder up to a third of the estate's population was on the Corporation's waiting list for housing elsewhere.

Although individual flats were quite commodious and, mostly, well cared for, many residents complained about rubbish strewn external spaces and graffiti scarred stairwells and landings as well as the isolation of living at high levels. The district heating system generated its own problems because people had no control over the temperature.

As early as 1972, Elgy Gillespie wrote in this newspaper that Ballymun's problem were "likely to explode" as its 8,000 children grew older. "There are few playgrounds with swings and roundabouts for the small ones, or temporary playing pitches. There is nowhere for them to go in bad weather, no indoor play place, no community centre."

In 1974, the Architects' Journal said tower blocks had turned out to be a "disastrous" solution to mass housing. "Gardens in the air and parks on the ground were a seductive vision but the excessive costs of multi storey housing forced local authorities to renege on the provision of basic amenities and communal facilities."

Reflecting the change in thinking, the Architectural Review agreed. "Towers and slabs set in open space create bad housing for the ordinary run of mortals; but they serve very well where there are few children, where there is another home in the country, where there is carpet in the vestibule and a commission faire at the door," it said.

In Britain, some 440,000 high rise dwellings were built between 1953 and 1972, representing one sixth of all local authority housing. But in 1974, the British government decided that there would be no more tower blocks. A year earlier, the French government banned further vast new housing projects, describing them as sad and inhuman".

That the same time, a Dublin Corporation maintenance official first detected movement in some of Ballymun's wall panels, just six years after the towers were built. "Minor fractures" also started to appear - in the blocks, due to the use of quick drying high alumina cement which was later banned in Britain because of its tendency to expand.

In 1979, The Irish Times reported that exterior plaster around the 10,000 windows in the tower blocks was falling away, exposing the steel reinforcing bars underneath, causing them to rust and, in turn, throw even more plaster off. A programme of treatment began in the previous summer, using a patent mortar to fill the holes. But even this fell out.

Similar difficulties had plagued high rise developments in Britain, and the combination of soaring repair bills and increasing vandalism made demolition a realistic option. In several cases, flats built in the 1960s were dynamited to dust; one of these demolitions, in 1979, was attended by Dublin Corporation's chief housing maintenance officer.

The Socialist Party, in a booklet entitled Ballymun in Crisis, called for the provision of much needed new facilities, including a family sports and recreation centre, an extensive park with a boating area, several supervised playgrounds, a 24 hour accident clinic, adequate playschool and nursery facilities, a public launderette and an industrial estate.

BUT there was no money for any of these facilities and Ballymun's problems were compounded by the fact that three quarters of its population were effectively disenfranchised; an unseen boundary ran right through the estate, leaving two of the seven tower blocks in the city and the remaining five in Co Dublin, which had no interest in them.

By the mid 1980s, if not earlier, it had been turned into a sociological "sink". Unemployment was reckoned to be 45 per cent, at least 1,000 of the tenants were drug addicts, one in six was an unmarried mother, a further 10 per cent were either deserted or separated wives, and Ballymun was declared the State's "most disadvantaged area".

As the Ballymun Task Force - noted in 1987, hundreds of vacant and wrecked flats, vandalism, decay and drug problems "all combined to give the impression of a community falling apart at the seams. Ballymun was no longer the place to be, but a purgatory unfortunate souls had to pass through before moving on to greener pastures."

Billy Keegan, a local left wing Labour activist, was among the first to call for its demolition as the only way to "get the axe to the root cause of the problem". But the City Council had rejected this radical course in June 1984. Instead, a Corporation report suggested that "Ballymun" would be renamed after its traditional townlands, Balcurris and Sillogue.

Three months later, several hundred people gathered outside the Bank of Ireland branch at the shopping centre to witness the key being turned in the lock for the last time as a local piper, Tom Phelan, played a lament. Even though An Post agreed to cash people's welfare cheques, it was a black day indeed for "Ireland's greatest housing scheme".