Every planner in Ireland works in the shadow of a few hard decades. Between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, Dublin lost a large share of its Georgian and older fabric to office development, road schemes and slow, deliberate dereliction. The phrase that sums up the period comes from the title of Frank McDonald's 1985 book, The Destruction of Dublin, published by Gill and Macmillan. McDonald, then a young journalist who later became Environment Correspondent of The Irish Times, built the book from his own research in Dublin Corporation's planning and roads departments, the Land Registry and the Companies Office. It named the developers, speculators, architects and road engineers behind the hoardings, became a best-seller, and could not be reprinted because of threatened libel actions. Four decades on, it remains the essential account of the period.
Fitzwilliam Street: the first great rupture
The opening shot came on Lower Fitzwilliam Street. The Electricity Supply Board, which had started out in a single drawing room at No. 28 in 1927, came to occupy all sixteen houses from No. 13 to No. 28. Those houses formed part of an unbroken Georgian terrace running for nearly a mile from Merrion Square East to Fitzwilliam Place, with a famous vista towards the Dublin Mountains.
In 1962 the ESB announced that it would demolish the sixteen houses and build a new headquarters. A protest meeting in the Round Room of the Mansion House in January 1962 drew about 900 people, with more turned away at the door. The board brought in the English architectural historian Sir John Summerson, who dismissed the terrace as "simply one damned house after another". Dublin Corporation granted permission in January 1962, and on appeal the Minister for Local Government, Neil Blaney, confirmed it in July 1963. The ESB's case was helped by a tragedy that summer, when Georgian tenement buildings collapsed on Bolton Street and Fenian Street in June 1963, killing two elderly people in one case and two children in the other. Old houses were now seen by many as a danger rather than an asset.
Demolition began in the spring of 1965. The replacement, by Sam Stephenson and Arthur Gibney, winners of an architectural competition, was completed in 1970. Its facade echoed the old plot widths, but it never escaped the circumstances of its birth. One house in the group, No. 29, survived and was later restored and opened to the public in 1991. The Stephenson Gibney building has itself now gone, replaced by a new headquarters by Grafton Architects and O'Mahony Pike, completed in 2022, which aims to respect the character of the Georgian street around it.
Hume Street: the battle that changed minds
If Fitzwilliam Street showed how vulnerable the Georgian city was, Hume Street showed that people would fight for it. In 1966 Dublin Corporation granted the Green Property Company permission for an office block on the site of four houses at the corner of Hume Street and St Stephen's Green. The company bought more houses, but the street was then listed for preservation in the city's first draft development plan, and a larger scheme was refused. In 1969, on appeal, the Minister for Local Government, Kevin Boland, granted permission.
Demolition began in December 1969 and stopped almost at once, when students, many of them from the architecture school at University College Dublin, occupied the houses. They stayed for six months, repairing floors and stairs. In the Dáil in March 1970, Boland famously dismissed the campaigners as "a consortium of belted earls and their ladies and left-wing intellectuals".
The occupation ended in the early hours of Sunday, 7 June 1970, when private security men and demolition workers broke into the houses. That afternoon about 1,000 people attended a protest meeting addressed by politicians including Garret FitzGerald, Mary Bourke (later Mary Robinson), Noël Browne and Justin Keating. The Minister for Finance, George Colley, then secured an agreement that the company would reapply for permission. It eventually got it, on condition that it reproduced the facades of the original houses. The developer won, but Hume Street proved that conservation was not merely the hobby of an elite.
Wood Quay: archaeology versus the civic offices
The most dramatic campaign was about what lay under the ground. Dublin Corporation chose a four-acre site at Wood Quay, between Christ Church Cathedral and the Liffey, for new civic offices designed by Sam Stephenson. The city manager granted approval in December 1970, and after objections and an oral hearing the Minister, Bobby Molloy, confirmed it in 1972. The National Museum of Ireland excavated the site at intervals between 1973 and 1981, revealing one of the most important Viking settlements in Europe.
The Friends of Medieval Dublin, chaired by Professor F.X. Martin of UCD, began the campaign to save the site in 1976. In 1978 the High Court declared the area a national monument, but the Corporation was still able to proceed. On 23 September 1978 an estimated 20,000 people marched through the city. Mary Robinson, the group's legal representative, told the crowd they were marching to stop the destruction of Wood Quay and to have the offices built elsewhere. In June 1979 campaigners occupied the site in what became known as Operation Sitric, but they were forced out later that month after the Supreme Court upheld an injunction against them. Excavation ended in March 1981, and the first phase of the civic offices was completed in 1986.
Roads, dereliction and the quays
Less visible, but arguably more damaging, was the effect of road planning on the older city. The 1971 Dublin Transportation Study assumed the Corporation's proposed Inner Tangent ring road would go ahead. The 1973 Central Dublin Traffic Plan, prepared by consultants R. Travers Morgan, went further, proposing a Western Tangent through the Liberties with a raised crossing of the Liffey at Usher's Quay. The full scheme was never built, but Kevin Street and Cuffe Street were turned into dual carriageways, and properties along proposed routes were left to decay while they waited for road widening that came late or not at all.
By the late 1970s, as McDonald later recalled, there were derelict sites everywhere, including along the Liffey quays, and buildings boarded up for demolition all over the inner city. In February 1986 the Dublin Crisis Conference filled the Synod Hall at Christchurch Place for a weekend and called on the Government and the city authorities to accept that Dublin was in crisis. Groups such as Students Against the Destruction of Dublin took the argument onto the streets.
What followed, and the lessons for planning today
The response came in stages. An Bord Pleanála took over planning appeals from the Minister in 1977, ending the era in which a single politician could decide cases like Fitzwilliam Street and Hume Street. The Urban Renewal Act 1986, with tax reliefs in the Finance Act of that year, designated the Custom House Docks and other inner-city areas, including the quays, for renewal. In Temple Bar, CIÉ had spent years buying property for a central bus station; instead, the Temple Bar Area Renewal and Development Act 1991 set up state companies to regenerate the district. Most importantly, the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1999 introduced the Record of Protected Structures and architectural conservation areas, carried into the Planning and Development Act 2000. As McDonald has noted, it was only then that Ireland adopted preservation laws comparable to the rest of Europe.
For planners, three lessons stand out. First, uncertainty is itself destructive: a line on a road plan or a vague redevelopment intention can blight a street for decades. Second, process matters. The worst decisions of the period were taken by ministers on appeal, and the public lost faith in a system that seemed to favour speculators. Third, active citizens and a vigilant press are part of a healthy planning system, not obstacles to it. Hume Street and Wood Quay were lost, but they changed what the next generation of decision-makers thought acceptable. Today's debates about vacancy, dereliction and compact growth continue the argument McDonald set out in 1985.
Further reading
- The Destruction of Dublin, by Frank McDonald
- The Construction of Dublin, by Frank McDonald
- Georgian Dublin: Ireland's Imperilled Architectural Heritage, by Kevin C. Kearns
