It will not provide much consolation to those caught up in Dublin’s housing crisis, but the situation was even worse more than a century ago.
Data from the 1911 Census, which has been released online by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), shows that 60 per cent of all homes in the capital then were one-room tenements.
The city, which consisted of the area between the Royal and Grand canals, along with parts of Cabra, Crumlin and Ballyfermot, had a population of 304,802 at the time. There were 35,477 homes, 21,133 of which were one-room tenements.
Nearly 70,000 people, almost a quarter of the population, lived in tenement buildings. In Dublin, 132 families lived in a one-room tenement with 10 people or more. Five families lived in a one-room tenement with 12 people in them.
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Before independence, Dublin had a reputation of having some of the worst slums in the United Kingdom. The housing situation was one of the principal motivations behind the Dublin lockout of 1913, with two tenements collapsing in Church Street causing the deaths of seven people that year.
A government inquiry, published in February 1914, showed that many elected councillors on Dublin Corporation were complicit in the abject state of housing in the city.
It found three members of the corporation alone owned 46 tenement houses between them, while 10 other members of the corporation owned or partially owned one to three tenement houses.
They were able to avail of tax rebates in relation to the housing they owned despite the substandard nature of much of the accommodation.
The government report revealed the “want of a firm administration has created a number of owners with but little sense of their responsibilities as landlords, and that it has helped much in the demoralisation of a number of the working classes, and increased the number of inefficient workers in the city”.
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Slum clearance did not really begin until after Irish independence, but it took until the 1960s for all the tenements to be vacated.
No other city in Ireland came close to the number of tenements. In Belfast, then the biggest city on the island, only 1 per cent of homes were one-room tenements.
One-room tenements were also found in rural districts, mostly situated close to the Atlantic coast. Belmullet in Co Mayo, for example, had 14 one-room tenements per 100 houses inhabited.
