Ep 44 - Dublin's Housing Crisis (1726 - 2026)

Here's The Wolfe Tones.

So here's to Finglas and Bluebell.

And the girls of Ballyfermot.

From Blackrock out to Ballymun.

And the boys in Sean McDermott.

For a city is its people.

So stay and stand by me.

And we'll share our lives in this old town.

Sure, it's part of you and me.

Dublin is often referred to as a Georgian city, so to start, let's go back 300 years and to a period that saw a rapid expansion of the city to become what many called the second city of the British Empire.

Here's Kathleen Janes, Teampa Bótharé from UCD, architect Stephen Wall, actor Brian Murray, tenement resident Sean Garland, and historians Padraig Yeates and Shane McThomas to guide us through two centuries of the rise and fall of Dublin housing.

It's worth noting that the prosperity of Dublin mentioned was happening at the time of the penal laws, the apartheid style system imposed by England, which essentially saw the enslavement of up to 90% of the Irish population.

Music is from Noel Pearson, Dominic Behan, and Christy Moore.

George is the name of four successive English kings who ruled beginning in 1714, uh, into the early 19th century.

And the term is used to describe architecture of that period, but above all, to describe the architecture in Dublin from the 1720s to the Act of Union at the end of the century.

Georgian Dublin is, above all, a city of red and brown brick houses, townhouses, and of exceptional buildings that are faced in or actually built, as the Bank of Ireland is, out of stone.

The enormous explosion in the scale of the city of Dublin at this period, if you think that the original city center is around the two cathedrals, and today it's really centered on the Bank of Ireland.

That's famously the biggest traffic knot in the city.

And so the explosion in the scale of the city as it moves east in particular, north and south, but also in the q- quality of the construction, the permanence of the construction.

Well, there's streets like Henrietta Street, and then of course, there are the sequences of squares that really anchor people in the city, Mountjoy Square, Merrion Square, squares that were originally the green space shared communally between these houses.

And the streets that are generally relatively broad by European standards at the time, lined with what were usually, at the time, houses.

Although today, many of them have become apartments, and of course, in South Dublin, most of them are now offices.

Generally speaking, the people who lived in these houses were wealthy people.

Of course, they also had their servants with them, so there were many people of much more modest circumstances dwelling and working in these buildings on a daily basis.

But The incentive, the impetus for the expansion of the scale of Dublin is partly the presence of the parliament here.