There is a particular kind of Irish book that is written in a rage and read as a relief, and Frank McDonald's The Destruction of Dublin, which we looked at here last week, was one of them. McDonald himself, looking back in a 2008 Irish Times essay on the 1980s, confessed as much, admitting that he simply could not understand why the city was being treated by developers as a quarry and by road engineers as an inconvenience to traffic. But rage, however well documented, is not a policy, and the more interesting question for anyone who works in planning now is what came after the anger: how a city that one former Lord Mayor, the late Jim Mitchell, had likened to a knacker's yard managed, within a generation, to persuade people that it was a place worth living in again.
McDonald's own answer came four years after the first book, in Saving the City: How to Halt the Destruction of Dublin, published by Tomar in 1989 with, of all things, an introduction by Bob Geldof. The title is worth pausing on, because it marks a shift in register from lament to prescription, from the charge sheet to the to-do list, and that shift was happening not only in one journalist's head but across a whole loose coalition of citizens, students, clerics, senators and, eventually, ministers.
This piece was always going to lean heavily on McDonald, and it is hard to write it without noting that he is no longer here to quarrel with it. He died in September, after a short illness, at the age of 76, and The Irish Times, reporting his death, recalled that he had become the paper's first environment correspondent in 1986 on the back of his investigations into planning failures and dereliction in Dublin. It was a sad day for the city, and for anyone who cares about what becomes of it, whichever side of a planning appeal they happen to sit on.
A weekend in the Synod Hall
If the change of mood has a date, it is the weekend of 7 to 9 February 1986, when the Dublin Crisis Conference filled the old Synod Hall at Christchurch Place. McDonald, writing about it thirty years later, named the organisers as Dean Victor Griffin, Senator David Norris, Larry Dillon, Deirdre Kelly, Mick Rafferty, Donal Storey and himself, a list that tells you something in itself, running as it does from the Dean of St Patrick's to a north inner city community activist. They even got the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, to turn up and respond to their conclusions, the principal one being a demand that the Government and the Dublin local authorities "recognise and accept that the city is in crisis".
It is easy, at this distance, to smile at a demand that amounts to asking officialdom to admit there is a problem, but anyone who has sat through a few council meetings will know that this is usually the hardest step of all. The conference asked for more than an admission, though. It called for the destructive road plans for the inner city to be abandoned, and for tax incentives to encourage people to live in the centre rather than merely to work in it. The papers, the conference report and a later Manifesto for the City survive in the Frank McDonald collection at Dublin City University, alongside a programme cover by Martyn Turner, which is about as Dublin as an archive gets.
The people problem
The real insight of the period, and the one that has aged best, was that buildings were never going to be saved by preservation orders alone. They would be saved, if at all, by people living in them. McDonald credited the late Deirdre Kelly, founder of the Living City Group, with driving this point home, and in his 2015 farewell piece he recalled that in 1986 regional planners saw no hope that the inner city could take even an extra 10,000 people. The idea Kelly pressed was not entirely home-grown. As McDonald noted in a 2018 Irish Times piece on the Leeson Street residents, drawing on the historian Erika Hanna, Kelly had been influenced by Jane Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities had argued in 1961 that city streets live by their mix of uses and the people on them, and who had helped to defeat Robert Moses's plan to drive a road through Washington Square in New York. Catriona Crowe, writing in The Dublin Review after Jacobs died in 2006, recalled first reading the book in the early 1980s in Mountjoy Square, just after one of the last clearances of Georgian tenements on Summerhill and Gardiner Street, which suggests the argument needed very little translation.
The numbers explain their pessimism. On McDonald's figures, the population of the inner city, the oval between the two canals, had fallen from about 250,000 in the mid-1920s to just 75,000 by 1991, so that only one Dubliner in twelve still lived in the historic core. Some of that decline was the welcome result of clearing the tenements and rehousing families in Marino, Crumlin and beyond, and it would be unfair to the public health reformers of the 1930s to pretend otherwise. But by the 1980s the drift had gone well past slum clearance into something closer to abandonment, with the centre treated as an office district ringed by ghettos, to borrow McDonald's own blunt phrase.
Tax, Temple Bar and the accidental village
The State's response was, characteristically, fiscal. Within months of the Synod Hall weekend the Government announced a tax incentive scheme for derelict areas, which, with the Urban Renewal Act 1986, brought the Custom House Docks and stretches of the quays into play. Planners have argued ever since about whether the property-based tax schemes that followed were a masterstroke or a mistake, and the honest answer is probably both: they got cranes moving where nothing else had, and they also produced a fair amount of the shoebox apartment, laid out along artificially lit corridors, that McDonald himself came to regret.
Temple Bar is the most instructive case, partly because it was saved by accident before it was saved by design. CIÉ had spent years from the 1970s quietly buying property between Dame Street and the Liffey for a central bus station, and, as Dublin City Council's archive notes, it let those buildings out cheaply in the meantime, which drew in artists, musicians and small traders who then became the most effective opponents of the bus station. Charles Haughey, never a man to leave a cultural flagship unclaimed, declared in 1987 that he wouldn't let CIÉ near the place. By February 1991 he was telling the Dáil that a new company, Temple Bar Properties, would acquire the CIÉ and Corporation holdings as a flagship project for Dublin's year as European City of Culture, and the Temple Bar Area Renewal and Development Act followed that summer.
What happened next is a lesson every regeneration agency should keep pinned above its desk. The cultural quarter that was meant to rival Covent Garden became, in McDonald's own words, "the temple of bars". None of that cancels out the new squares, the restored streets or the cultural buildings, but it does show how hard it is to plan for the bohemian life that had grown up there precisely because nobody was planning anything at all.
From protest to practice
The 1990s brought a quieter but in some ways more durable kind of saving. Dublin Civic Trust was founded in 1992 to show, by buying and repairing buildings, that old houses could be lived in and made to pay their way. Dublin Corporation, for its part, began to lead by example, and a Trinity College Dublin study of urban conservation in Dublin points to the Corporation's "Living Over the Shop" pilot at Nos. 2 and 3 Capel Street, two eighteenth-century buildings it owned, as the moment the local authority began to take a leadership role in conservation. The same study is a useful corrective to any rosy account of the decade, recording that conservationists were still going to court, and to Europe, over schemes they believed were wrong, and that some felt cooperation alone would never have been enough.
The legal turning point came with the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1999, which, as McDonald noted, meant Ireland belatedly adopted preservation laws comparable to the rest of Europe, though without the generous funding that usually goes with them. In the same year, Archer's Garage on Fenian Street, a rare art deco building, was illegally demolished over the June bank holiday weekend and had to be rebuilt more or less in facsimile, which was, whatever one thinks of facsimiles, a sign that the old impunity was ending.
What saving actually meant
The results can be counted. McDonald's figures have the inner city population, including the docklands, rising to more than 130,000 by 2011, and Dame Street, which he remembered as a dark thoroughfare enlivened only by the Olympia, is now lined with restaurants and shops that hardly close. Much of the agenda set in the Synod Hall, from repopulating the centre to recasting the road plans and giving more space to buses, bicycles and people on foot, has become ordinary public policy, so ordinary that younger planners may not realise it was ever heresy.
And yet it would be a strange history of Dublin that ended on a note of triumph. By 2016 McDonald was writing that the city was in crisis again, this time a crisis of homelessness, rents and sprawl rather than dereliction, and wondering aloud whether another Crisis Conference was needed. Aldborough House, the last of the great Georgian mansions, was still rotting on Portland Row when he retired, and the fire regulations that make it so hard to put homes over shops remain, as he put it, a serious impediment.
For a planner, whether acting for a developer or a residents' association, the lesson of the saving years is not that the campaigners were always right or the officials always wrong. It is that cities are saved by people choosing to live in them, by the rules that make that possible, and by the slow, unglamorous work of repairing what is there before reaching for the bulldozer. That argument was made in a church hall forty years ago, and the vacancy and dereliction debates of 2026 suggest it has not quite finished being made.
Further reading
Saving the City: How to Halt the Destruction of Dublin, by Frank McDonald (Tomar, 1989)
The Construction of Dublin, by Frank McDonald (Gandon, 2000)
The evolution of urban conservation in Ireland: evidence from Dublin city, Trinity College Dublin research archive: http://hdl.handle.net/2262/67653
The Frank McDonald collection, Dublin City University Library: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/frank-mcdonald-collection-dublin-city-university-libraries/JQUhSErgYWxr5w?hl=en
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs (Random House, 1961)
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