Sins of the Father E-Book

Conor McCabe

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The questions surrounding how the Irish economy was brought to the brink – who was to blame, and who should pay for these mistakes – have been rightly debated at length. But beyond this very legitimate exercise, there are deeper questions that need to be answered. These questions relate to why we made the decisions we did, not just in the last 10 years, but over the last 80. How did certain industries become prominent at the expense of others, banking as opposed to fisheries, international markets as opposed to indigenous industry and job creation? Are our problems structural in nature, and most importantly, what do we need to know to make sure that this crisis does not happen again? These are the questions set by this book. It will look at the development of the Irish economy over the past eight decades, and will argue that the 2008 financial crisis, up to and including the IMF bailout of 2010 and the subsequent change of government, cannot be explained simply by the moral failings of those in banking or property development alone. The problems are deeper, more intricate, and more dangerous if we remain unaware of them, but also potentially avoidable in the future if we break the cycle.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Housing

2 Agriculture

3 Industry

4 Finance

5 From Bank Guarantee to Bailout

6 The Other Side of the Show

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to:

Beth Amphlett; John Bissett; Donagh Brennan; Kevin and Jack Cleary; John Cleary; Ronan Colgan; Mel Corry; Mags Crean; Rudi Deda; Vicky Donnelly; Ciarán Finnegan; Daithí Flynn; Brian Forbes; Colm Hall; Brian Hanley; Donal Higgins; Darren Hudson; Linda Howard; Frank Keoghan; Seán Lucey; Kathleen Lynch; Mark Malone; Donal McCarthy; Eugene McCarthy; Padraig Walsh McCarthy; Niamh McCrea; Scott Millar; Marie Moran; Moira Murphy; Tom Murray; Stevie Nolan; Donnacha O’Briain; Claire O’Connell; Tom O’Connor; Cathal O’Lorcawn; Mick O’Reilly; Miriam Guillén Pardo; Aubrey Robinson; Brian Stafford; Michael Taft; the staff of the National Library of Ireland and in particular Gerard Kavanagh; my brothers Aiden, Niall, Paul and Gerard, and my sisters Kathleen, Nora, Sandra and Siobhan; and Joanne Walsh.

INTRODUCTION

There have been more than a few attempts to explain why the Irish banking crisis developed the way it did, and the argument that it was due to a breakdown in moral standards is quite a popular one. The journalist Fintan O’Toole was explicit in this regard when he wrote in 2009 that, ‘The absence of a sense of propriety, of restraint and of right and wrong’ on the part of the bankers ‘was not just obnoxious, it was economically disastrous.’iThe Irish Times talked of a ‘frightening lack of morality’ within Anglo Irish Bank, the most indebted of the Irish institutions, and how the actions of its chairman ‘cast a shadow over the ethical culture of the bank he ran for most of the past 33 years.’ii The newspaper’s senior business correspondent, Arthur Beesley, said that the directors of Irish Life and Permanent inhabit an ‘ethical cocoon in which the sense of right and wrong is at odds with standards in the outside world’, while the economist Brian Lucey talked of the immorality of the government’s actions in pouring money into Anglo Irish Bank in a desperate attempt to keep it going as a business concern.iii

Yet, the banking crisis in Ireland was not caused by pockets of immorality in an otherwise reasonably well-functioning system. The ruthless pursuit of profit is not personal; that is the way business works. And what is condemned as immoral in times of crisis is often praised as savvy and pragmatic in times of prosperity.iv Similarly, there is nothing particularly unique about the ethical cocoons of Irish bankers, their frightening lack of morality, lack of restraint or sense of propriety. This was a worldwide financial crisis, after all, not a regional or a Celtic one. In other words, it was not the implosion of speculative debt but the ability to transfer that debt wholesale onto the shoulders of the State which marked out Irish bankers as a step above their worldwide contemporaries.

The decision by the Irish government on 30 September 2008 to guarantee almost all the liabilities of six Irish financial institutions was not an economic decision but an exercise in power. ‘The deeper truth exposed by the present crisis,’ wrote the journalist and politician Shane Ross, ‘is that Ireland harbours more powerful forces than Fianna Fáil.’v And while this is true, the purpose of this book is not to show that banks and property developers are indeed powerful in Ireland but to explore why that is the case. What is it about the Irish economy that has made financial and property speculation a core activity and not, say, fisheries or gas? Why were builders and insurance salesmen fêted as entrepreneurs, while indigenous exporters outside of agriculture and tourism struggled to find support? How did this situation arise, and how deep are its roots?

Put as concisely as possible, the type of business activities which dominated the Irish economy in the twentieth century – cattle exports to Britain and financial investment in London; the development of green-field sites and the construction of factories and office buildings to facilitate foreign industrial and commercial investment; the birth of the suburbs and subsequent housing booms predicated on an expanding urban workforce – saw the development of an indigenous moneyed class based around cattle, construction and banking. These sectional interests were able to control successive government policy, much to the detriment of the rest of the economy, which had to rely on whatever scraps it could pick up from quasi-committed multinationals and government-funded grants and tax breaks. In 2008 the construction and banking sectors of that class closed ranks in order to protect themselves from oblivion, resulting in the bank guarantee and the creation of the National Asset Management Agency.

The power to do that did not develop overnight. In order to find the reason why that class was able to wield such influence at such short notice, we are going to have to dig. This book sets out a historical analysis of the events of September 2008 in order to achieve that objective.

History provides a canvas wide and deep enough to enable us to see the economic and political mechanisms, the machine itself, in motion. By looking at the way the Irish economy actually works – the deep structures and investment strategies – the government’s response to the banking crisis, despite its inherent insanity, starts to make sense. The logic behind it reveals itself. It is still deeply shocking, but it was not the result of a few bad apples.

The plan of the book is, hopefully, straightforward enough. There are four chapters dealing with the development of the Irish economy, and two chapters on the crisis itself. It starts with housing, as the subject is saturated with so many myths and half-truths that it demands a factual analysis. There is no Irish property-owning gene. It is not part of our DNA. Home ownership outside of rural areas is a relatively new phenomenon. Chapter Two deals with cattle, as it is simply impossible to discuss the history of the Irish economy without discussing beef and live exports. Up until the 1980s, cattle was to Ireland what the car industry was to Detroit and, although the Irish Free State gained partial independence in 1922, its economy, via the cattle industry, remained intertwined with that of the UK.

The structural problems related to that situation – an independent country with a regional economy – had an influence on the so-called Whitaker/Lemass revolution in the 1950s and the superficial industrialization of the Irish economy in the decade which followed in its wake. Ireland imported foreign industry as a substitute for indigenous industrial growth. This is also the period when we see a new type of Irish businessman – the speculative builder and financier – come to the fore. The banking system is opened up and liberalized. By the late 1980s foreign industrial investment has stalled. The government decides to extend its low corporation tax rate to financial as well as industrial exports. The International Financial Services Centre is born. Ireland becomes a tax haven, with minimum regulation and oversight. By the time the last of the barriers to speculative financial trading are lifted in the US, Ireland is more than ready to take the world’s money. In 2008 the veneer of cheap credit suddenly fades, leaving the shaky edifice of the Irish economy exposed.

It is hoped that these six chapters will shine a light on the reasons why Ireland has the businesses it has, and why banks and speculators wield so much power and influence. It is only by acknowledging the facts of our situation that we can even begin to attempt to do something about it. This book is presented as a small contribution to that process.

1

HOUSING

A lot of what we consider to be normal and natural about Irish housing dates from the 1920s. The first garden suburbs were built during this time, with significant subsidies to private builders backed up by a government policy that promoted home ownership above tackling the tenements and slums. It was a policy which favoured the middle classes and the higher-paid, skilled members of the working class.1 However, while suburbia can be traced back to the turn of the last century, it took decades for this type of planning to become the norm. Issues such as cost, distance, work and community all acted against these moves towards the periphery. In other words, there is nothing natural about suburbia. There is nothing normal about living significant distances from one’s place of employment, even if it is normal to us today. The semi-detached with a garden and a fence was not an organic or spontaneous development. As with so many things regarding large-scale societal development, it began with an idea and was pushed through by government, through the use of incentives and the elimination of alternatives.

In 1898, an English civil servant produced a book entitled Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, in which he described his vision for the cities of the future. His name was Ebenezer Howard and his publication proved to be quite popular. It was quickly followed by a second edition, which he called Garden Cities of Tomorrow, the name by which it is commonly known today. Throughout the nineteenth century, the apparently insurmountable problems of urban sprawl – poverty, dirt, disease and crime – were subject to a multitude of official reports and parliamentary enquiries. Rural dwellers were regarded as stronger and healthier than their urban cousins who, it was believed, suffered from both physical and moral decay. Cities were depraved and corrupt, while the countryside was honest and noble. However, it was seen as well-nigh impossible to have an industrial society without urbanisation. It was unfortunate, but the stench and decay of the modern city were simply part of the sad but necessary price of progress. Its extremities could be tempered, but never eradicated.

Howard thought otherwise. He wanted to merge the benefits of the city with those of the countryside through the creation of satellite towns of no more than 30,000 people and 1,000 acres, each surrounded by an agricultural green-belt of 5,000 acres and 2,000 people, and linked to the main metropolis by quick and efficient public transport. This ‘town-country’ fusion would offer the individual and his family such opportunities for employment and personal advancement as available in any town, while also providing the benefits of fresh air and bright sunshine via the city parks and nearby countryside. He wanted to show how, in his ‘town-county’ cities, ‘equal, nay better, opportunities of social intercourse may be enjoyed than are enjoyed in any crowded city, while yet the beauties of nature may encompass and enfold each dweller therein’.2 Over the next sixty years, Howard’s vision of ‘garden cities’ mutated into the suburbs of today.

It is not a coincidence that the dominant form of housing in modern Ireland, i.e. one-family occupancy with a garden in suburbia, can be traced back to a small book by an English reformist. When it came to housing and planning, Ireland frequently looked across the sea to Britain, and this influence was present in Irish newspapers, journals and pamphlets, as well as official reports, planning committees, and architectural design. From the 1880s onwards, the House of Commons passed legislation which gave a notable amount of Irish rural labourers ‘high-quality, low-cost social housing and also created a social housing sector which was precociously large for its time’.3 These acts, along with the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act, provided the underlying framework for much of social housing schemes which were built post-independence.

The reason for this advancement in rural housing was not altruistic but political. The Irish Parliamentary Party used land reform as a tactic in its campaign for self-government. The transfer of land ownership from landlords to farmer-tenants led to demands for a similar franchise on the part of agricultural labourers, who were excluded from land reform, but who were too much of a social force to be ignored by the Parliamentary Party. From 1883 to 1906, some 20,000 agricultural labourers’ cottages were built by local authorities.4 Construction rose to new levels after the introduction of the 1906 Labourers (Ireland) Act.5 By 1922, an estimated 50,582 cottages had been completed under the various Acts. This accounted for about 10 per cent of the total rural stock. By way of contrast, during the same period only 8,861 dwellings had been completed by urban councils. This was despite the fact that Ireland’s rural population was declining while its urban population was increasing.

The Irish Free State inherited a rural social housing system and a body of planning laws and design ideas from the British administration, but very little in the way of actual, constructed, urban social housing. Whatever was needed to address the needs of the towns and cities, the Irish government was going to have to work out for itself.

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO 1932

‘[We] wish to resuscitate the speculative builder …’6

On the eve of the First World War, around 29 per cent of Dublin’s population lived in slum conditions. This included not only the majority of unskilled labourers, but also a significant proportion of the city’s skilled (or artisan) workers. In 1923, the Cork Borough Restoration Committee said that the city needed at least 2,500 houses. The same year, the Limerick Housing Association called for the immediate construction of 3,000 houses and that all rented accommodation be subject to medical, sanitary and structural tests. ‘The housing conditions in Limerick,’ it said, ‘are a perpetual crime against humanity.’7 Two years earlier, it had been reported that of the seven members of a family who lived in one room of a tenement in the city, three had died of influenza, ‘and for a time living and dead were together in the one small apartment’.8 The Irish Minister for Justice and Foreign Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, told the Dáil on 12 June 1923 that, ‘We are confronted with a serious situation in regard to houses; it is a disease in our social system.’ These sentiments were echoed by W.T. Cosgrave at a meeting of the Rotary Club at Clery’s Restaurant, Dublin in 1924. ‘At no time in the history of this country was there greater need for the provision of housing for all classes of the community,’ he said, adding that he knew ‘of no service in the State that demanded a greater amount of co-operation and sacrifice in order to achieve something towards the desired end’.9

It was clear that the housing problem was of such a scale that it could not be solved without significant government assistance. The manner of that assistance, though, was a matter for debate.

At the same Rotary Club meeting where Cosgrave spelt out the seriousness of the housing problem, he also discussed the government’s preferred solution. The Irish Times reported his conclusions:

Looking around the country he knew of no better platform than that of the Rotary Club from which to deal with this subject. They [the government] had discovered during the last few years that neither municipalities, nor local authorities, nor State organisations were in a position to deal alone with the housing problem. They had come to the conclusion – and he thought it would be subscribed to by all who had knowledge of the conditions – that if success in this matter were to be achieved it must come through private enterprise; that is to say, commercial enterprise.

Cosgrave’s speech was praised by Irish Builder and Engineer, which wrote that ‘it was gratifying, in these days of socialism, to find the head of State disassociating himself from the foolish notions that some have, that the whole of such vast problems have only to be made a government concern to be solved’.10 And the President’s comments echoed those of his cabinet colleague Ernest Blythe, who said in June 1923 (as Minister for Local Government) that ‘we believe, in general, more houses could be got for the money available by subsidising private builders than by subsidising local authorities’.11 It was a rare occasion of a government minister publicly stating that he wanted less money for his department.

Cumann na nGaedheal planned to reduce the level of construction undertaken by local authorities, and instead divert public funds to private builders (via grants and tax breaks) in order to answer the State’s housing needs. The party argued that it was doing this because public services were inefficient and incapable of delivering value for money. The contradiction of a private sector that needed public money in order to deliver an ‘efficient’ service was never teased out by Cosgrave, Blythe, and the rest of the ministers.

The government not only moved to divert funds from the local authorities; in a number of cases it shut them down completely. The official reasons ranged from the over-charging of business rates to financial irregularities on the part of councillors. However, the councils which were disbanded had on them a strong Sinn Féin and anti-Treaty presence. Dublin City Council, for example, had passed resolutions calling for the inspection of jails, the release of Civil War prisoners, and their examination by the Corporation’s medical officer.12 Dublin Corporation Council was dissolved in May 1924 by order of Seamus de Burca, Minister for Local Government, who was satisfied, having heard the evidence of an inquiry into the council, ‘that the duties of the Council of the County Borough of Dublin are not being duly and effectually discharged by them’.13 Cork Corporation was suspended the same year, with P. Monaghan appointed as commissioner. Monaghan said, ‘The Corporation was a business concern, to be run on business lines, with a definite programme of work to be done in a definite time and for a definite amount of money.’14 He told the people of Cork that although he was a Dublin man, he had their interests at heart, and was better positioned to answer their needs than the elected representatives from their communities.

There may have been other reasons for the suspension of the local authorities. In January 1924, Thomas Johnson, leader of the Labour Party and the official opposition in the Dáil, told the House that:

… there appears also to be an intention to remove any control which local authorities may have in the past intended over the layout of sites: that where something in the nature of a town plan was decided on by a local authority, it is now suggested that all those decisions shall be set aside, and that anyone will be allowed to build a house anywhere, in any fashion, subject to the final decision as to the design of the house by the Minister for Local Government. I think that is a defect, and I think that there ought to be, in the minds of Ministers, some general plans and that the policy of laissez-faire in house-building should not be allowed to continue.15

For the next six years, the administration of the capital, including the social housing programme, was in the hands of three government-appointed Commissioners.

The Housing (Building Facilities) Act was passed by the Dáil in April 1924. It provided grants of between £60 and £100 to anyone building a house for their own use, for sale, or for rent. It also offered remissions on local authority rates. The maximum selling prices were £270, £300 and £450, for three, four and five-roomed houses respectively. An additional Housing Act was passed in 1925, which expanded on the themes of speculation and owner-occupancy.

Although these Acts applied to all urban local authorities, most construction took place in Dublin and Cork. Cathal O’Connell, in his book The State and Housing in Ireland, explains why:

The modest level of housing activity which these Acts stimulated was limited to Dublin and Cork – big local authorities who could raise money through bond issues on the stock exchange. This is illustrated in the figures for house completions. Fully 80 per cent of all local authority building by local authorities was carried out by Dublin and Cork Corporations. Because the Local Loans Fund, the mechanism used to finance local authority infrastructure projects, did not extend to housing schemes, smaller local authorities who wanted to proceed with schemes had to borrow funds from commercial banks who were very reluctant to lend money for such ‘unproductive’ purposes.16

The majority of houses built under the Acts was done so not by speculative builders but by owner-occupiers. This was the type of laissez-faire construction that Johnson had warned about, and the local authorities had opposed before their suspension.

Nevertheless, future owner-occupiers as builders of their own homes, using whatever sites they could and lacking any sense of town planning, was seen as a positive outcome by the government. The argument was that this process would free up the quality rented accommodation previously occupied by the now property-owning middle classes. These vacancies would eventually filter down to the slums, allowing those who could afford the rents to move up the housing chain. The problem was one of congestion, the government said, and the 1924 Act would help to relieve this.

For that to happen, though, populations would have to have remained absolutely static. The moment that more people entered the equation – through births, the continued migration of thousands from rural to urban areas, and by people starting families of their own – the spurious symmetry of housing which is freed up for those at the bottom by those at the top, is gone.

The government’s plan also required that the housing problem itself did not exist. They maintained that it was not housing that was the problem, but the lack of better housing for the middle classes which was causing the bottleneck within the slums. It was as if the need for housing was akin to a tram queue, one that no new passenger ever joins, but which is made shorter by those at the top buying cars and becoming transport-occupiers instead. Yet, this was the logic: middle-class people and property speculators, building and selling houses with public money, will make life better for those in the tenements and slums.

The reason why local authorities were excluded from the Act was all too clear to Richard Corish, the Labour Party TD for Wexford. On 25 January 1924, he spoke in the Dáil in relation to the Housing Bill:

The President has suggested here, on more than one occasion, that the reason that prompted him to take this matter out of the hands of the local authorities was that the houses would cost too much money if they were built under their jurisdiction. I do not know whether that argument is correct or not. I do not believe it is correct, because I do not see why the local authorities, whose members represent the people, would squander money to the extent suggested by the President. The only inference to be drawn from the President’s statement is that the money would be squandered. I have yet to learn that any private builder will take as much interest in the working classes as a local authority. I do not think the President is going to accomplish what he proposes to set himself to do under this Act, by handing over the building of houses entirely to private builders. This, to my mind, is an invitation to private people to become speculators, without due regard to the fact that these houses are wanted for the housing of the working classes.

In the words of one historian, the Housing Acts of 1924 and 1925, by emphasising owner-occupation, tended ‘to favour the middle classes, rather than the working classes, for whom the housing problem was so severe’.17

The First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War had all dramatically curtailed building activity in Ireland. By the time hostilities had ceased in 1923, it had been almost ten years since Ireland had seen relatively normal levels of construction. The drop in new housing affected the middle classes, and it was this shortage rather than the horrendous slum conditions in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford that the Free State government made its priority. ‘One might as well try and live in an aeroplane,’ said one Dublin Corporation barrister, summing up the middle-class dilemma, ‘as to get a vacant house in Dublin.’18 The Housing Acts were one element of this strategy, while the other was the construction of suburbs.

‘NOTHING GAINED BY OVERCROWDING’

In 1914, Dublin Corporation commissioned a study for a proposed garden city at Marino from the respected town planners Raymond Unwin and Patrick Geddes, both of whom were admirers and colleagues of Ebenezer Howard. Their original plan called for 1,100 houses with a density of twelve per acre, green paths and a complete separation of traffic and pedestrians.19 A further plan was commissioned in 1918, this time from the City Architect, Charles McCarthy, with final permission given in 1920. This was for 530 houses, construction of which did not begin until 1922 due to the post-war political upheaval.

Marino was Dublin Corporation’s first garden suburb. By the time the final tender was completed in 1927, the scheme had expanded to include Croydon Park and consisted of 1,283 five-roomed houses with a density of twelve per acre. Although it was social housing, the entire scheme was tenant-purchase. On 21 May 1925 the Dublin Borough Commissioners invited ‘applications from persons of the working classes, employed or resident in the City of Dublin, for the purchase of houses at Marino under the Corporation house Purchase Scheme’.20 There were 258 houses available in this first batch and the prices ranged from £400 to £440.

The Corporation received 4,400 applications for the first phase, of which a shortlist of 414 was drawn up. The houses were earmarked for married couples with at least four children, but of the 414 families shortlisted, not one had fewer than six children.21 A deposit of £25 was also required, but the Borough Commissioners – who, since the suspension of the Corporation Council in 1924, had the final say in all applications – stated that ‘preference, however, will be given to intending occupiers who are prepared to deposit the whole or a substantial portion of the purchase money’.22 Each applicant had to be able to meet the minimum weekly repayments of 15-16s a week. Such financial barriers meant that the Marino scheme was out of the range of the majority of Dublin’s working class.

In March 1927, tenders were advertised for the erection of 128 three-roomed houses, seventy-seven four-roomed and sixty-one five-roomed in the fields behind St Patrick’s Training College, Drumcondra. This was the first time that Dublin Corporation had tendered for three-roomed houses and as with Marino, the scheme was tenant-purchase. Prices went from £230 for a mid-terraced three-room, to £460 for a semi-detached five-room, with the Corporation offering forty-year loans at 5¾ per cent for part or all of the price.23 The weekly cost to the purchaser ranged from 9-17s a week, depending on house size. On its completion in 1929, the scheme consisted of 535 houses: 211 three-room, 144 four-room, and 180 five-room.

Dublin Corporation began construction on Donnycarney in 1929, which, upon its completion, comprised 421 houses of four rooms each. Prices ranged from £300 to £380, and again were offered to married couples with four or more children. Similar prices and offers were made with regard to the first section of the Cabra area scheme at Fassaugh Lane. The Corporation had also begun construction on 484 houses in Emmet Road, Inchicore, with prices ranging from £300 to £440.

In September 1926, the Cork Commissioner announced at a meeting of the city’s Rotary Club that he ‘proposed to raise a loan of £100,000 Corporation Stock, to be expended on the building of 200 new houses in the city’.24 The houses were built on land behind Evergreen Road and to the side of Curragh Road, and followed the construction of 158 houses at Capwell. As with the Dublin housing schemes, the Cork houses were for purchase only. During this time, one ninth of the population of Cork City lived in tenements. Mr Monaghan was following Dublin’s lead by providing ‘affordable’ housing for those in secure employment with relatively high wages, as a means of combating the problems of the tenements and slums.

Between 1924 and 1929, the Dublin City Commissioners sanctioned the construction of around 2,436 houses, almost all of which were sold by tenant purchase.25 The price of the houses, and the cost of the loan repayments in the form of weekly rents of 9-17s a week, meant that the effect of the new houses on the city’s slums and tenements was negligible.

The Free State’s policy of owner-occupancy was applied to schemes completed before 1924. Over the next ten years, all of Dublin Corporation’s suburban cottages – a total of 4,248 dwellings – had been sold to tenants.26

Prior to independence, Dublin Corporation’s housing policy was primarily concerned with providing ‘cheap dwellings for unskilled labourers in central districts’.27 However, there was a significant body of opinion which opposed this policy. In early 1916, both the Citizens’ Housing League and the recently formed Dublin Tenants’ League (headed by William Larkin, brother of Jim) argued that garden suburbs were the only solution to the city’s slums. This was broadly in line with the social ideals of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement. Post-independence, the Free State government took on board a lot of the architectural ideals of Howard – twelve houses per acre, with gardens, and schools and shops as part of the layout – while pushing to one side the social, economic, and cultural arguments which underpinned his work.

The entry of Fianna Fáil into the Dáil in 1927 changed the dynamic somewhat, and in 1929 Cumann na nGaedheal passed a Housing Act which provided some relief to the majority at the end of the scale. This was followed by the 1931 Housing Act which placed slum clearance centre stage. It provided for ‘The clearance of unhealthy areas, the demolition and repair of unhealthy houses, the compulsory acquisition of land, and the assessment of compensation’.28

These objectives were given a further boost in 1932 with the Fianna Fáil-sponsored Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous) Act, which enabled local authorities to fund slum clearance on the type of scale demanded by the problem. The legislation stated that preference be given to families living in one-roomed dwellings, where either:

(a) one or more members of the family is or are suffering from tuberculosis; or

(b) one or more members of the family, exclusive of the parents, has or have attained the age of sixteen years; or

(c) the dwelling has been condemned as being unfit for human habitation.

The Act also required that ‘The Minister [for Local Government] shall not make any contribution under this section towards the expenses incurred by local authorities in the provision of houses in respect of which grants have been made by him under the Housing Acts, 1925 to 1930’. Fianna Fáil were not just building upon the 1931 Housing Act, they were making a clear break with Cumann na nGaedheal’s policy of housing the middle classes and more ‘respectable’ working classes.

1932 TO 1948

The majority of the working class could not apply for Cumann na nGaedheal’s house purchase schemes. The structural deficiencies within the Irish economy would not allow it. The type of employment needed to sustain a universal owner-occupancy policy simply did not exist. Fianna Fáil recognised this, and set out not only to provide housing for those at the lower end of the wage scale, but also to create the type of economy which would sustain an urban population and limit the drain from rural society. It introduced a series of tariffs and incentives to bolster local industry, and returned to building flats in central locations and houses for rent rather than purchase.

Under the various Housing Acts, local authority housing (as opposed to local authority building grants) was earmarked for the working classes in the towns and cities and agricultural labourers in the countryside. The 1908 Housing Act, which was the legislative baseline for all Irish Housing Acts until it was repealed in 1966, provided a definition of ‘working classes’. It read:

The expression ‘working classes’ shall include mechanics, artisans, labourers, and others working for wages, hawkers, costermongers [street sellers], persons not working for wages but working at some trade or handicraft without employing others except members of their own family, and persons, other than domestic servants, whose income in any case does not exceed an average of thirty shillings a week, and the families of any such persons who may be residing with them.

The Dublin Housing Inquiry, which sat from 1939 to 1943, having considered popular and official views of ‘working classes’, took the view that the phrase covered:

All classes of adult persons in receipt of an average weekly income not exceeding the highest wage rate of a skilled tradesman. We naturally exclude persons who have substantial reserves of property or capital, even if their current wage income would otherwise qualify them. We also exclude those persons obviously belonging to a higher economic category whose current earnings may be low owing to terms of apprenticeship, training, instruction, probation, or similar conditions.29

Despite the inquiry’s best efforts, it could not come up with an actual figure for Dublin’s working class based on income, because in the early 1940s the Revenue Commissioners did not have this information. Instead, it had to rely on the 1936 census reports for occupations, and through this criteria, it came to the conclusion that working-class households constituted 75 per cent of the capital’s families.

In terms of housing, the problem was not that 75 per cent of Dublin’s households were working class, but that under Ireland’s economy the wages were so low as to make the provision of housing for the working class on a private, profitable basis virtually impossible. As we have seen, houses tended to be built by their future occupiers, and where speculative construction did take place, it was not uncommon for the houses to be sold to landlords rather than to owner-occupiers. Private housing on a scale necessary to address the needs of the working population was unthinkable under the Irish Free State’s low-wage, export-led, agrarian-based economy.

However, in order to qualify for a local authority house or flat, it was not enough to be a member of the working classes; you had to be able to pay the rent as well.

The available pool of rent payers had an influence on loan floatations. The ability of prospective tenants to pay rent affected the terms and conditions of the construction loans. Most local authorities believed that one fifth or more of income on rent was too heavy a demand on the tenant, as such levels of payment undermined the householder’s ability to feed and clothe his or her family. As such, public housing rents were often less than this ratio. These so-called ‘uneconomic rents’ were possible only through substantial rate and State subsidy. Even with this, families with very low incomes were often passed over in favour of families with enough of an income to pay corporation rents after the family’s physical needs had been met.

The housing schemes of Crumlin, Cabra, North Lotts, Terenure and Harold’s Cross dominated the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1939, Dublin Corporation built 6,019 cottages for rent, of which more than half were in Crumlin. By way of comparison, just 229 were built by the Cumann na nGaedheal government in the previous eight years. Fianna Fáil also returned to providing flats in central locations. In 1931, the City Architect was instructed to ‘construct a three-room model flat, the expenditure not to exceed £30, so that a clear idea may be gained of the class and extent of the accommodation which a dwelling of this type will contain’.30 The largest schemes centred on Cook Street, Hanover Street, Railway Street, Popular Row and Mary’s Lane. Between them they accounted for almost 70 per cent of the 1,619 flats built between 1933 and 1939.

The scale of the 1930s housing schemes can be seen by the fact that in the forty-four years prior to 1931, Dublin Corporation had built 7,246 dwellings, 78 per cent of which were houses.31 This figure was doubled over the next eight years.

The 1946 census is the earliest we have which gives a breakdown of owner-occupancy in Ireland. Of the 662,654 private dwellings recorded that year, 348,737 (or 52.6 per cent) were either owned outright or were being purchased by the householder. There were 31,173 dwellings which were occupied rent-free, leaving 282,744 (or 42.7 per cent) which were rented. However, these national averages were by no means uniform across the State. In Kildare, owner-occupancy stood at 38 per cent, while in Mayo it was 86.2 per cent. There was also a significant difference between rural and urban areas. Cork County Borough (i.e. Cork City), for example, had a home-ownership level of only 13.2 per cent. Similar levels were recorded in the county boroughs of Waterford (13.6 per cent), and Limerick (13.8 per cent). In Dublin City, owner-occupancy stood at 23 per cent, while in Dún Laoghaire it was 30.8 per cent.

Even where offered, home ownership was not the automatic choice for working-class families. In 1923, the Labour Party noted that with home ownership as the only solution offered to the housing problem, ‘workers are being compelled to purchase their homes and [are] saddled with the cost of maintenance’.32 Twenty years later the Dublin Housing Inquiry noted that ‘many tenants did not want to buy a house, but used the only means at their disposal of getting a house. If similar accommodation could have been got on renting terms most of them would have preferred it.’

The policies of the local authorities which placed garden suburbs on the edge of the cities were at odds with the practicalities of working-class life. It was remarked at a meeting of the Civics Institute that ‘it seemed to be impossible to induce people to go outside the city (i.e. to newly built suburban areas), even if dwellings were there for them’.33 Families were allocated houses by the Dublin Corporation, but were done so on an individual basis. In other words, families, not communities, were moved to the garden suburbs. Often there was little public transport available, and the houses were quite a distance from where people worked and socialised. There were few shops, and even fewer pubs. The families that moved to Crumlin in the 1930s were saddled with an increased cost of living. In 1940, Jim Larkin told the Government Housing Commission that up to ‘20 per cent of the tenants in the Crumlin area were living below starvation level’.34 His evidence was collaborated by Dr C. Hannigan, Crumlin, who told the Dublin Board of Assistance in May 1940 of a case of:

… a man and his wife and eight children, whose income was 25 shillings a week, out of which rent and light absorbed one-half a week. The children were sent to an outside school so as to get the benefit of the midday free meal. The diet of the family consisted of bread and tea.35

The corporation’s policy of building large numbers of three-roomed houses in Crumlin was at odds with its allocation policy which gave precedence to the largest families: ‘Almost 70 per cent of the families who were allocated Corporation housing from 1934 to 1939 had more than six members, yet only 39 per cent of the houses built at Crumlin South had four rooms.’36 The ‘garden cities’ plan for Crumlin in the 1930s was as far from Howard’s original idea as the Marino and Donneycarney schemes of the 1920s, albeit in different ways. Whereas Cumann na nGaedheal took the aesthetics of garden suburbs and privatised it, Fianna Fáil built more, with fewer rooms, and made them for rent. The idea of the garden suburb as an interconnected community of work, shelter, education and leisure, was as elusive as ever. In the words of Máirin Johnston, author of Around the Banks of Pimlico, ‘housing schemes gave [the people] houses, but it stripped away the fabric of their lives’.37

The scale of construction, however, was entirely new. From 1898 to 1948, over 100,000 dwellings were constructed by local authorities, and a further 80,000 by private citizens and speculative builders with public financial assistance. Yet, 65 per cent of these dwellings had been constructed during Fianna Fáil’s tenure in government, ‘53,000 by the local authorities and 66,000 by private persons under the Housing Acts, 1932 to 1946’.38 Fianna Fáil had promised to build flats and houses for the working classes, and to a large degree it had kept its promise.

The war years greatly curtailed construction, due to a shortage of manpower and materials. In January 1948, the Department of Local Government circulated a White Paper on housing, and estimated that approximately 100,000 new dwellings were required, of which 60,000 were needed to house the working classes. A general election was held in February 1948 which was lost by Fianna Fáil and led to the formation of the first Inter-Party government. It also led to a change in emphasis in housing policy.

1948 TO 1959

The Irish Times printed an editorial in July 1948 entitled ‘White Collar Dwellings’. It welcomed the news that Dublin Corporation was extending the issuing of loans to builders and potential owner-occupiers under the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act:

Faced by the exigent need to make some provision for those who are not rich enough to pay for the type of homestead that seemed to be within reach ten years ago, or poor enough to qualify for the tenancy of a Corporation cottage, Ministers, as we believe, are justified in their decision to extend to the fullest possible measure of assistance to those who are able and willing to contribute towards the solution of their own problem of housing.39

The formation of the first Inter-Party government in February of that year saw the return of Cumann na nGaedheal (now renamed Fine Gael) to power for the first time in sixteen years and the resetting of owner-occupancy as a cornerstone of housing policy.

The policy was not to restrict house prices in order to accommodate affordability, but to use government money to chase after rising prices. ‘Even the most modest type of dwelling for the average wage-earner and his family is likely to cost something not far short of £2,000,’ wrote The Irish Times in its July editorial, ‘a figure which represented the pre-war cost of modern villa residences for comparatively wealthy people.’ Yet, instead of embracing the logical conclusion – that as free-market speculators and private builders cannot provide affordable housing, it’s probably best not to leave such a fundamental societal need in the hands of those who cannot provide it – the government began to once again subsidise private builders with public money in order to make housing purchases ‘affordable’ for the middle classes.

Two years previously, The Irish Times criticised the policy of rehousing ‘thousands of families … at the public expense’ while there were ‘hundreds of citizens’ who could buy their own homes ‘if only they can buy them on reasonable terms, and thus can do without State or local bounty’.40 The fact that these ‘reasonable citizens’ needed as much State assistance to buy their homes as the thousands of families who needed State assistance to rent their homes, was conveniently ignored not only by The Irish Times but by a government which saw subsidised private ownership and private construction for the middle class as acts of citizenship, and subsidised rents for the working class as ‘a public expense’. This idea of ownership as citizenship, and rent as scrounging, would eventually shed the language of class which enveloped it during this period, but none of the class dynamics from which it gained its energy and direction.

The first Inter-Party government allocated £580,000 to private building in its 1948 Housing Act, and by 30 June 1949 the Department for Local Government had approved 6,292 grants. The majority of these grants – 4,247 – were for housing in rural areas. The Department’s Minister and Labour TD Michael Keyes told the Dáil that:

… private enterprise could make a very valuable contribution to the solution of the housing problem. And it was, therefore, desirable that any uncertainty as to future policy in the matter of grants should be removed, so as to allow full scope to persons intending to plan for the building and reconstruction of houses within the next two or three years.41

He was speaking on the occasion of the Dáil debate on the Housing (Amendment) Bill, 1949, which proposed to triple the amount of government spending on private house construction from £580,000 to £1,750,000, and to allow grants for the building of new houses for letting and the reconstruction of existing housing in rural areas. Private landlords would now receive public money in order to provide private rented accommodation.

The private ownership of a house was often put forward as a panacea for all of society’s ills. Not only would the promotion of home ownership save the local authorities money in the long run, it would also bring stability and good sense to a family. In 1952, the Labour Party senator, James Tunney, told a meeting of Dublin County Council (of which he was chairman) that ‘I am a firm believer in private ownership, because it makes for better citizens, and there is no greater barrier against communism.’42 He went on to say that ‘where all the necessary conditions regarding repair have been complied with, the tenants should be compelled to purchase, unless they could show very good reason for not doing so’. The Educational Building Society (EBS) stated at its annual general meeting in 1956 that it was carrying out ‘important social work’ in ‘promoting a property-owning people’.43

The social arguments for owner-occupancy were raised once again in 1957, by the Bishop of Cork, the Most Revd Dr Cornelius Lucey. ‘The man of property is ever against revolutionary change,’ said Dr Lucey at a Confirmation ceremony at Monkstown, County Cork. ‘Consequently a factor of the first importance in combating emigration and preventing social unrest, unemployment marches, and so on, is the widest possible diffusion of ownership.’44 Dr Lucey raised these points as he believed that ‘ownership [of property] is neither valued nor favoured among us, as it should be’.

In 1962, a UN team of housing experts, including Charles Abrams, came to Ireland to compile a report on urban renewal. They were suitably impressed with the government’s initiatives, and wrote that Ireland was undertaking ‘one of the largest slum-clearance and public-housing programs in the world in terms of population, has emptied many of the central slum areas of Dublin, and is now proceeding with renewal legislation designed to replace slums with non-residential as well as residential land uses.’45

One year later, the Minister for Local Government, Neil Blaney, announced his ‘home for every family’ housing policy. He amended legislation so that allocation for local authority housing ‘would not be determined by whether a person was by definition an agricultural labourer of a person of the working classes, but primarily by his need for housing’.46 ‘This,’ he said, ‘would unequivocally admit to eligibility for the benefit of State and local authority facilities all persons in need of housing, including old people, small farmers, widows and other special categories whose needs had not been adequately served under existing legislation.’ Whether it was Blaney’s intention or not, his Housing Bill of 1963 added to the view that local authority housing should be the housing of last resort.

In February 1966, the Fine Gael TD Mark Clinton put forward a motion during Private Members’ Time in the Dáil, ‘urging the government to facilitate the provision of tenant-purchase schemes for Corporation tenants in Dublin, Cork, and other municipalities’.47 Mr Clinton said that such a move would show that ‘The government was alive to the interests of citizens who wished to better themselves’. This idea was given its fullest expression in the Fianna Fáil government’s Housing Act of 1966, which allowed local authority tenants in urban areas to purchase their houses. It took as its model the 1936 Labourers’ Act, under which almost 80 per cent of the 86,931 labourers’ cottages had been sold to tenants in the twenty-eight years since its inception. During the same period, 6,393 urban dwellings had been sold to tenants.48 This figure dramatically increased over the next twenty-five years.

In 1971 there were 112,320 local authority rental housing units in the State, which amounted to 15.9 per cent of the total households. By 1981 this figure had dropped to 111,739, and now constituted 12.4 per cent of total households. Yet, there were 64,170 new local authority units completed between 1971 and 1980. The State was selling its public housing stock to its tenants quicker than it could build it. The amount of households in urban areas in 1981 that either owned their property or were buying their house from a local authority was 65.6 per cent. In 1961 that figure was 37.9 per cent. The tenant-purchase scheme had been heavily utilised, and resulted in ‘waves of heavy selling of local authority housing.’49

Purchase prices for local authority housing were typically extremely favourable to tenants. The tenant-purchase scheme implemented by Dublin Corporation in the late 1980s, for example, entitled discounts on the market value of housing of up to 60 per cent. The consequence for Irish social housing was that by the early 1990s, of the 330,000 dwellings built by local authorities over the previous century, some 220,000 had been sold to tenants, which amounted to one in four of the homes in private ownership in Ireland by that time. They were thus a major contributor to the overall tenure revolution and in particular were the dominant means of access to home ownership for the urban and working classes.

Home ownership reached its peak in the early 1990s, with 74.5 per cent of all households in urban areas, and 81 per cent of all households nationwide, listed as owner-occupied or occupied free of rent.50 What had been paid for collectively, had been sold off individually. The de facto privatisation of Irish housing meant that the need for a house was now replaced by the need for a mortgage. The banks, building societies and mortgage brokers were the unchallenged gatekeepers to securing a home.

By the end of the 1960s, there was an estimated housing need of 59,000 – with unfit houses of 35,000 and overcrowding of 24,000.51 The State would need to build 9,000 dwellings a year, with projections for the mid-1970s at 11,500 a year ‘to meet the loss of dwellings through obsolescence, etc., and to provide for increases in numbers of households’. It was reported that with increased prosperity, local authority housing was no longer a priority, and that the majority of housing would be produced by private builders and other agencies.

1971 TO 1987