An Irish Town Planner: Irish Planning History: The Historians of Dublin’s Suburbs and Slums

For the last two Fridays this series has leaned on a journalist. Frank McDonald wrote the charge sheet against the destruction of Dublin and then the programme for saving it, and he wrote both with a reporter's eye for the villain of the week. But journalism, even very good journalism, is written against a deadline, and the slower question of how Dublin came to have the shape it has (why it sprawls, why its inner suburbs look the way they do, why so much of its social map was fixed before most of our grandparents were born) has been answered mostly by a small group of academic geographers and historians. Their work is less often quoted at oral hearings than it should be, and this piece is an attempt to introduce it to planners who may only know it by its cover.

Ruth McManus and the making of the suburbs

The obvious place to start is Ruth McManus's Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs, first published by Four Courts Press in 2002 and reissued in a new edition in 2021. McManus, now Associate Professor of Geography at Dublin City University, set out to explain three decades in which, as her publisher puts it, "many of the formative decisions that came to shape the modern low-rise, low-density city were taken". Anyone who has ever argued for or against density on a suburban site in Dublin is, whether they know it or not, arguing with the consequences of those decisions.

The book's structure tells the story on its own. Its contents page moves from the 1913 Housing Inquiry, through Patrick Geddes and Raymond Unwin as consultants and the Dublin Town Planning Competition, to the Civic Survey of 1925 and the new municipal boundaries, and only then to the Corporation as developer, with sections on the location debate between city and suburbs and on flats versus cottages. It is a reminder that the arguments we treat as new, about whether to build up in the centre or out at the edge, were being had in almost the same words a century ago.

McManus's most useful idea for a practising planner is what she calls a "development continuum". The usual story divides Dublin's growth neatly into Corporation estates on one side and private speculation on the other. Her research suggests something messier, with the State, the Corporation, public utility societies (a form of co-operative housing body) and private builders all interacting, so that the line between public and private development was never as sharp as it looks on a zoning map. A long chapter is given over to a single builder, Alexander Strain, whose estates in Drumcondra and Glasnevin show how much one speculative builder could shape the layout and style of a whole district.

She has kept returning to the subject. With Joseph Brady she wrote Building Healthy Homes: Dublin Corporation's First Housing Schemes, 1880-1925, published by Dublin City Council in 2021, which looks at the small, well-built inner city schemes that most Dubliners walk past without noticing, and ends with Marino and Drumcondra, seen at the time as models for the future and still sought after today. The two have since added Killester: From Medieval Manor to Garden Suburb (2025), the story of the garden suburb built in the 1920s for ex-servicemen of the First World War.

A personal note. When I taught in the School of Spatial Planning at what was then the Dublin Institute of Technology, Dr McManus kindly gave a lecture to my class. It was a generous gift of her time to students just beginning to learn how the city they would go on to plan had come to be, and I remain grateful for it. Her books have had a place on my shelves ever since, and I am glad of the chance to say thank you.

The view from outside Dublin

McManus has also done planners outside the capital a favour. In a 2018 article in Urban History she turned to the provincial towns of the Free State, pointing out that Dublin's slums had so dominated the story that it was "largely overlooked" that the rest of the country was struggling too. She challenges the idea that the inter-war years were a kind of limbo in Irish housing, and the figures she gives are striking: from 1922 to 1927 local authorities built about 6,500 houses, compared with about 9,000 in the previous forty years, and by 1940 local authority dwellings accounted for 84,000 units, more than half of them completed in the 1930s.

Her case study is Ballina, whose council built more houses than any other urban council, owning almost half the houses in the town by 1938. It is a cautionary tale as much as a success story. New schemes were often of a single type and a single class of tenant, rents were beyond many of the families who most needed the houses, and the rates bill rose sharply. One letter to the council on behalf of 228 tenants at Tirawley Park and Lord Edward Street recorded that 160 of them were on unemployment assistance. Anyone who works on social housing or mixed-tenure schemes today will recognise the problem: the people who most need decent housing cannot always afford to pay for it, and a scheme that is built for one group alone can harden into a district apart.

Joseph Brady, Anngret Simms and the long view

McManus's work sits inside a larger project. With Joseph Brady, formerly head of the UCD School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, and Anngret Simms, formerly Professor of Geography at UCD, she co-edits the Making of Dublin City series from Four Courts Press. The first volume, Dublin Through Space and Time, c.900-1900 (2001), edited by Brady and Simms, is the best single introduction I know to how the city's plan was laid down. Simms writes on its origins and early growth, Edel Sheridan on the designing of the capital between about 1660 and 1810, including the Gardiner and Fitzwilliam estates and the Wide Streets Commission, Jacinta Prunty on public health and housing in the nineteenth century, and Brady on the city at the turn of the twentieth century. Brady has since carried the story forward in later volumes, including Dublin 1930-1950: The Emergence of the Modern City (2014) and Dublin 1950-1970: Houses, Flats and High-Rise (2016).

For a planner the value of this series is that it treats the city as something built by decisions, not by fate. The Wide Streets Commissioners, the great estates, the Corporation's housing architects and the speculative builders all appear as actors with interests, powers and constraints, which is exactly how a planning file reads today.

Jacinta Prunty and the slums

If McManus explains the suburbs, Jacinta Prunty's Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography explains what people were fleeing. Based on her UCD doctoral thesis and published by Irish Academic Press in 1998, it rebuilds the slum geography of the city from public inquiries, property valuations and the records of women charity workers, and closes with a study of the north city parishes of St Mary's and St Michan's. A review in New Hibernia Review compared it to a "Brandeis brief", an argument built on data rather than authority, and noted that Prunty, a Sister of the Holy Family, does not use her research to push a thesis of her own. Another, in Victorian Studies, observed that she lived and worked in the Coombe, one of the districts in the book, and called the result "a kind of lamentation for the poverty of both people and policy".

What strikes a planner reading Prunty is how fluid the slum turns out to be. Clearing one court pushed families into the next, a pattern McManus found repeated in miniature in Ballinasloe in the 1930s. It is a useful corrective whenever a regeneration scheme is promoted as a clean solution to a problem that has simply been displaced.

Erika Hanna and the sixties

The last book in this short survey brings us back to McDonald's territory, but from a different angle. Erika Hanna's Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957-1973, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, looks at the decade when, in its own summary, the physical landscape of Dublin "changed more than at any time since the eighteenth century". Hanna, whom McDonald himself drew on when writing about the Leeson Street residents, is careful not to read the period as a simple fight between philistine developers and enlightened conservationists. Her chapters move from planning and the eighteenth-century city to Kildare Place and the Irish Georgian Society, to housing, community and preservation, and to office politics, and her conclusion is titled "The Invention of Georgian Dublin". That phrase alone is worth a planner's attention: the Georgian city we now protect was, in part, a set of values that had to be argued for before it could be written into development plans and protected structure records.

What the historians give us

It would be easy to treat all of this as background reading, pleasant for a winter evening and irrelevant to Monday's file. I think that would be a mistake. Planning in Ireland is a statutory process, but it is also a cumulative one, and most of the questions that come across a planner's desk in Dublin, about density, tenure mix, the treatment of historic fabric or the relationship between a new scheme and the estate beside it, have a history that these writers have already mapped. A planner acting for a developer who wants to intensify an inter-war suburb, and a planner acting for residents who want to protect its character, are both better served by knowing why that suburb was laid out as it was, by whom, and under what rules.

There is also a lesson in method. McManus, Brady, Prunty and Hanna all work from the record: inquiry reports, Dáil debates, council minutes, valuations and maps. That is the same discipline good planning practice depends on, and it is a quiet rebuke to the habit, on all sides of a planning argument, of asserting what a place has always been like rather than finding out.

An Irish Town Planner

Friday, 6 November 2026

Irish Planning History: The Historians of Dublin’s Suburbs and Slums