Dublin — a case study of housing and the residual working class

Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class f‘ by David Byrne

This paper is about the relationship between the housing system in Dublin and that city’s working class. It focuses in particular upon the residuum, a term I am employing in a way which is equivalent in many respects to the idea of an industrial reserve army or reserve army of labour (see Marx, 1976, 781-802; Braverman, 1974, Chapter 17) or to what Friend and Metcalf describe as the ‘surplus population’ (1981, 119). The concept is essentially dynamic. It reflects not merely the ‘peripheral’ character of this part of the working class but also the implications of the processes of ‘deindustrialization’ which are forcing an ever larger part of the working class into this position.’

Dublin is interesting because this residuum is and always has been especially large which is itself a consequence of Dublin’s status as a European rather than a British city. That statement does have political undertones, but what I am getting at particularly is that Dublin is not a product of nineteenth-century industrialization, but is rather an ancient administrative and commercial centre which did undergo some midtwentieth-century industrialization, but which is now rapidly deindustrializing at the same time as it provides the overwhelmingly most important locale of urbanization in the rapidly urbanizing small country of which it is the capital. Ireland contains the perfect contrast which illustrates the point I am making, Belfast, the quintessential product of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization, which is now very rapidly and progressively deindustrializing. The most important aspect of this comparison/contrast is probably the contemporary convergence of the two urban types in terms of the spatial organization of their social structure.

t I should like to acknowledge the hospitality of the members of the Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Dublin in connection with the writing of this paper.

The usage of the terms central and peripheral here is that of Friedman (1977). He does not employ the terms statically or spatially, but is rather talking about an organizational/state of production system interaction which determines, in a dynamic fashion, the status of the working class. Note that hisexplanation, at least in my view, includes an implicit autonomist element in that part of the resolution of the position of workers depends on their political action. How- ever, their capacity for action, short of revolutionary transformation, is itself system founded.

David Byrne 403

This paper is about the relationship between Dublin’s housing system and that spatial organization of social structure. In particular it is about the role of the state through housing policies, a peculiarly (at least in the Northern European context) non-collectivist, commodity-centred set of policies which nonetheless include one of the oldest and most continuously important set of housing inver- ventions by a state/municipal agency. The National Economic and Social Council (NESC) recently produced a report Urbanization: problems of growth and decay in Dublin (NESC Report 5 5 , 1981). That title was very well chosen. Dublin is a city which is growing in a way that is quite the reverse of the decline e.g. of British conurbations or of Belfast. At the same time it has a particularly virulent inner-city problem and a peripheral housing zone which is essentially relocated inner city and which provides one of the downright nastiest social environments I have ever seen. Dublin’s population is growing. Dublin as a social space is decaying apace. This paper focuses to a very considerable degree on symptoms and is going to take the underlying cause largely as given. Nonetheless that cause at least needs to be stated.

Essentially Dublin’s ‘urban problems’ are a consequence of the city’s place within the world capitalist system - surprise, surprise! That place is particular and unusual. It reflects the historical status of Dublin as the capital of a particularly exploited colony, a colony whose exploitation, especially when considered in terms of the destruction of its precapitalist social formation by the colonial power so as to liberate labour as a crucial metropolitan reserve army, was an essential pre- requisite for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain and hence in the world. It reflects the twentieth-century use by transnational capital of ‘reserve space’2 in restructuring the form of capital/labour relations through spatial relocation. It relfects the political subordination of a historically militant urban labour movement to a petit bourgeois led nationalism, something which has particular significance for the politics of housing. In summary Dublin is first an old non- industrial (in the sense of non-manufacturing, although there were/are exceptions, e.g. brewing) city. This is Joyce’s and O’Casey’s Dublin. Its Medical Officer of Health described it in 1885:

In general terms it may truthfully be said of Dublin that it is a decayed city. It does not in the least resemble Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester, Clasgow and other British cities. The latter consist in great part of new buildings, but they differ essentially from Dublin in the important point that their working population live in houses built specially for them, and adapted to their wants whilst the Dublin artisans and labourers live chiefly in the decayed houses of former generations of people of superior rank (evidence of Dr Cameron, Royal Commission, 1885,102).

He went on to assert that the proper comparison with Dublin was not the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain, but the declining cities of northern Italy.

aThe term is Don Parson’s and is employed by him to describe the way in which particular ‘space’ has a reserve function as in general a locale of the reserve army of labour. Spatially orientated policies e.g. in regional development and urban renewal can be seen as state mechanisms for facilitating the underdevelopment of the ‘space’ and its present and potential human contents.

404 h b l i n - a case study of housing and the residual working class

Dublin in other words was a historical relic, a capital city without a nation to be capital of (favourite theme of the petit bourgeois nationalists who dominated Dublin Corporation from the 1860s onwards). Table 1 illustrates his point. In 1801 Dublin was the second city of the United Kingdom with a population of about 200 0o0, being second only to London. By 1901 it was merely the second city of Ireland having been surpassed by Belfast which had increased its population over the century from 20 000 to 400 000.

Table 1 Dublin’s population 184 1-1 98 1 (figures in 000s)

Inner City Dublin Suburbs Sub Region State

1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911. 239 1926 242 1936. 266 1951 220 1961 159 1971 132 1981 98

233 258 255 246 250 245 260 304 317 448 527 537 568 526

49 59 70 83 95

1 03 121 100 477 3140

506 2972 587 2968 693 2955 718 281 8 852 2938

1003 3443

+ = Boundary changes

Sources: O’Connor, 1979; and Daly, 1981.

However, that is not all Dublin is. As Table 1 shows, since the foundation of the separate state of which is now capital Dublin has continuously grown in population. Indeed in the post second world war decades the growth of the Dublin ‘urban area’ (Dublin City with its contiguous suburbs) has represented one of the most rapid examples of urban growth in western Europe. This reflects two things. One is usually described (e.g. by Bannon and Eustace, 1978) in terms of ‘tertiarization’ or growth of the ‘information industry’. That is to say with the reestablishment of a state for it to be capital of, Dublin has had the advantage of the implications for capital cities of the growth in governmental and commercial service employment and the tendency for these to concentrate in capital cities. Dublin, as the Ginger Man had it, is a city of clerks and their successors.

And Dublin has been a manufacturing city. Although the planning policy of the government and of its major agency the Industrial Development Agency, was through an essentially indicative planning system to locate new manufacturing industry outside Dublin, nonetheless old industries, e.g. brewing, industries dating from the protectionist phase in Irish economic policy, eg. car assembly, and new

DavidByme 405

inmigrant industries, e.g. electronics assembly, all provided the basis for what between 1950 and the mid-1970s was a growth in manufacturing empl~yment .~ However, it was this industrialization which was the most fragile element (at least ahead of the massive deployment of microtechnology in the office) in Dublin’s base. Whickharn describes its contemporary situation:

Dublin itself has recently undergone a process of effective deindustrialization. Contain- erisation has cut the workforce of the docks (the traditional recourse of unskilled labour) down from thousands to several hundreds, the old port industries and metal foundaries have gone, and there have been widespread job losses and some factory closures in the food processing sector. Many of the latter jobs were skilled, held by men brought up between the canals. Now to the extent that work is available to them, it is often located on suburban industrial estates, so that they face extra travelling and often a cut in wages as well. Certainly, some electronics plants are being located in the Dublin area and office work too has expanded. However, these will hardly provide new jobs for those who have been made redundant; the new jobs are often white-collar and/or female. Suburbaniza- tion has also of course included housing. The inner city of Dublin remains a centre of poverty, unemployment and a defined ‘social problem’. Meanwhile the bulk of the Dublin working class has been decanted onto the new suburban estates, into housing often de- signed with little awareness of their needs (Whickham, 1980,85).

A city of collapsing industry, fragde state employment and very great poverty, that is Dublin. The state employment is fragile because of the fiscal crisis induced by the relatively enormous extent of public sector borrowing undertaken by the Irish state to finance both support for industry and social consumption. The poverty is great because despite some moves towards a higher level of intervention and benefit in the 1970s, the Irish welfare state remains essentially residual (see Kennedy, 1981). This is not a novel situation but before the development of state intervention in the Irish economy in the 1950s the solution was emigration. What is different now is the way the plug has been put in the hole, both in terms of the

‘This paper begs a lot of questions about the relationship between the state and capital in Ireland. This is discussed in Perrons (1979) and in Wickham (1980). Both of these were Writ- ing before the particularly acute impact of recession on Ireland had developed and their accounts need to be reconstructed in relation to this. Very crudely I would consider that Irish economic policies since the mid-1950s here taken the form of a statist intervention which has had particular saliency for the historically important fractions of the bourgeoise concerned with the servicing of capital, but which also resembled social democratic regional policies elsewhere in terms of their immediute implications for sections of the working class. This is now changing in that world crisis seems to be removing advantages. Put crudely, the bills are coming in. However, these issues cannot be fully explored in this paper although they have great significance in relation to it. This is not just a matter of space and focus. Rather in the view of the present writer these issues have not been adequately addressed. Although Wickham and associ- ates have made some useful contributions at a structure/political level and Perrons poses some useful questions by identifying the significance of the labour process for understanding Ireland, Ireland is greatly underresearched as opposed to polemicized about. For example, there is no real study of the development of the class structure although the work of historians like OTuthaigh is useful. The absence of this basic work makes for difficulties in papers like this one which deal with the present situation. However, despite the enormous importance of historical specifcity I feel that we must look at contemporary situations even when the historical account is inadequate. If nothing else it shows up the gaps to be fiied.

406 Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class

absence of recipient locales, especially in Britain, and ideologically. Urban Ireland in the 1980s has lost the emigrant mentality. This paper is about one of the consequences of all this, about how the residuum gets housed, about a crucial aspect of the reproduction of the working class in which the Irish state has intervened in both physical and ideological sense. Indeed the contradiction between the ideology of state support for self-help and the reality for the poor4 of segregation in state provision has the potential of being a destabalizing element in Irish politics. To understand this we have to understand Dublin’s housing system as it has developed this century.

I Dublin housing over 100 years

In this section I want to review the form of housing problems and housing policies in relation to Dublin over the past 100 years. The historical consideration is essential to our understanding of the specificity of the ‘residuum’ in Dublin in terms of the changing and almost cyclical importance of thls group as part of the urban political economy. In other words I am reviewing policies which pre and immediately postindependence were concerned with the management of this class manifestation of basal change. In the 1930s and the 1950s-60s policies reflected rather the political role of a more (and the term is comparable rather than absolute) central working class. In the 1970s and 1980s basal decay and restructuring has brought the residuum back to the forefront of consideration.

The 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes provides us with a benchmark for a consideration of Dublin housing. I have already quoted from Dr Cameron, the Medical Officer of Health, on the character of that housing - tenements. Let me now quote him on solutions.

You are in favour of corporation housing for the poor? - I am. That is I might say, a ‘fad’ of mine almost.

Is your reason for being in favour of that, that there is no other way in which rents can be kept down? - There is no other way in which persons of the lower strata of the population can be properly housed. These persons who give the sanitarian the greatest amount of trouble, in whose houses I may say the fires of infectious disease are kept smouldering, cannot pay rents which would enable landlords, who look to the houses as a means of making an income, t o keep those houses in a sanitary condition.. . if the houses of persons are a source of danger to us, in self defence we are bound to keep those houses in a proper state, and I know of no way of doing that except by providing certain persons with accommodation, not in formeris pauperis altogether, but by the corporation constructing their dwellings and only allowing certain classes to occupy them (Cameron. 1885, Royal Commission, 254,56).

By 1913 when an iinterdepartmental committee was investigating Dublin’s housing after a tenement belonging to a member of the council had collapsed with

4For newly entrant households into Dublin’s housing system which lack two white-collar incomes, house purchasing is a virtual impossibility. The younger (that is under 30) generation of the Dublin poor working class generally fall into this category.

David Byrne 407

loss of lives having being passed for occupation with Cameron’s connivance, 6656 dwellings housing 32 061 persons had been provided on something approaching the sort of terms Cameron had suggested in 1885. Of these 1385 housing 7500 people had been built by the Corporation and the rest by societies of which the 5% Arti- san’s Dwelling Co. with 3081 dwellings housing 13 981, was the largest. As Daly (1981, 243) makes clear, as with their Peabody equivalents in London, these dwellings tended to be occupied by skilled artisans, policemen, etc. but the principle of block flat inner-city construction for working-class housing was well established in Dublin pre-1914.

The first systematic plan for housing provision in Dublin was drawn up in 1918 by P.L. Cowan, the Chief Engineering Inspector of the Local Government Board, on the basis of the findings of the 1914 report. His ’justification’ is well worth quoting:

Unless housing reformers are entirely mistaken, the earning capacity - the efficiency for output of work - will markedly rise in the Dublin District when the housing conditions are substantially improved (Cowan, 1918, 7).

His estimate was that Dublin needed 14 000 new self-contained houses. In this he was echoing the evidence of W. O’Brien, Vicepresident of Dublin Trades Council, to the 1913 inquiry in which O’Brien had proposed Corporation cottage house building at Marino and Cabra. However, while O’Brien, Connolly’s rightwing successor at the ITGWU, might have approved of Cowan’s contention that:

The root causes of the terribly depressed conditions of labour in Dublin are many and some of them are obscure; but there is little chance of any great improvement by the establishment of new industries or otherwise until a greater efficiency on the part of the Dublin worker is secured. No remedial policy is more promising than that of improved housing (Cowan, 1918,9).

Even he was unlikely to have agreed that:

A system of Government which entrusts the management of the business of a great city and the handling of more than E l million a year to the nominees of a multitude of needy people who have a direct interest in lavish and unproductive expenditure, and, so far as their limited view extends, no personal interest in efficiency or economy, and which practically disenfranchises all who are steadied by the responsibilities and duties of property and great business concerns, cannot produce good results (Cowan, 19 18, 12).

In any event Dublin Corporation was in fact suspended from 1923 to 1930 and a Town Manager system was imposed on its reestablishment. The next benchmark is provided by the Report of the inquiry into the housing of the working classes of the city of Dublin 1939/1943 (1944). Despite the construction by the Corpora- tion since the 1913 inquiry of 6913 cottage houses for renting, 4248 cottages for tenant purchase and 2249 flats for renting, the tenement house position was as bad as ever. Table 2 gives the comparative figures for 1913 and 1938.

The city boundaries had been enlarged to take in the middle-class suburbs of Rathmines and Pembroke so the situation was one of no change.

Effectively massive intervention, especially after populist measures by the 1932

408 hrblin - a case study of housing and the residual working class

Table 2 Dublin tenements 1913 and 1938

1913 1938

No. of tenement houses 5 322 6 307 No. of families resident 25 822 28 679 No. of persons resident 8 7305 111 950 Families per house 4.4 4.5 Persons per house 16.4 17.7

Source: Report 1939143.17.

Fianna Fail Government, had produced no change in the position of the housing of Dublin’s poor. As Table 1 shows, the Dublin inner city (traditionally understood as the area within the two canals) had retained its population at this date. All this was despite the extensive inner-city slum clearance in the 1930s under the 1931 and 1932 Housing Acts. Nationally 11 000 dwellings were demolished of which a substantial proportion were in Dublin. The massive programme of 1930s construction, often assigned as much to Fianna Fail’s sweethearting of the construction unions as to housing reasons, ran down in the 1940s due to shortages of materials and skilled labour. By 1948 according to the White Paper of that year Dublin needed 23 500 new dwellings out of a national requirement of 61 000. The construction programme was revived in that year as illustrated by Table 3.

Table 3 Dublin housing construction 1954-64.

Private L.A. Total

Dublin 9 113 8 921 18034 Dun Laoghaire 7 76 502 1278 County Dublin Suburbs 10 044 953 10997 Total 19 993 10 376 30 309

In the late 1950s the Corporation housebuilding programme was suspended in consequence of an increasing number of vacancies in the stock, but a rapid increase in metropolitan population in the early 1960s consequent in large part upon the 1958 programme for economic expansion and the associated increase in manufacturing employment, e.g. in car assembly, led to a massive demand for council housing.’ The Ballymun Housing Project was originated in 1963 as a means of dealing with this situation. This project was conceived from the beginning as an attempt at system building and was managed by the National Building Agency. Ballymun was built with some disadvantages:

It will be evident from the foregoing that the project proceeded from the cicumtances that land was available rather than in realization of a use or density zoning plan yet existed . . . Viewed intrinsically the scheme has a number of drawbacks. The site is somewhat small for the purpose served, awkward in shape, bisected by a main road and within a mile of the main flightway of the airport (O’ReiUy, 1967,87).

This was a period of real transformation in the Irish economy. The programme of economic dmlopmmt began in this period was intended to revers decline, massive emigration and large- scale unemployment. See Lyons (1981,599 onwards) for his account of this.

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The emphasis was on flatted construction which as O'Reilly indicates represented a break with Dublin's traditional policy of building council housing in the suburbs and 5 t s in the inner city. The scheme has not been a success. As the Ballymun Amenities Group said:

The decision to build Ballymun seems to have really been based on the need to look 11s if something was being done about the housing crisis. It was not an attempt to tackle the problem as a whole - that would have meant spending more money on housing and planning in the rest of Dublin. Ballymun was built as a big status symbol (1972. 6-7).

The estate, built under the particularly inflexible French Balency system, houses about 16 000 people, two thirds of them in deck access flats. It closely resembles Killingworth Township in dreariness, remote location and sump charater (see Byrne and Parsons, 1983).

The most recent general summary of the housing situation in Dublin is provided by Working Paper No. 10 of the Dublin Planning Department, Housing require- menfs of the Dublin subregion (1975). This identified a continuing situation of overcrowding with nearly 20% of the population living in overcrowded conditions and 6300 living in shared dwellings. Again construction requirements were esti- mated at 14 000 over five years.

Before attempting any analytical discussion of this situation there is a further element that needs to be introduced to the historical description. This is the state's attitudes to owner occupation and its policies for encouraging it. In 1976 the Department of Local Government asserted the position:

Local authorities provide houses for persons living in unfit and overcrowded conditions, for persons who cannot afford to provide adequate accommodation for themselves, and for special categories of need such as the aged, disabled persons, and newly weds (1976,4).

Thus public housing is strictly considered as being for those who cannot achieve owner occupation and owner occupation is the tenure of over 70% of households in Ireland. However, in Dublin things are more complex. In 1971 a quarter of all Dublin households were local authority tenants, half were owner occupiers, 12% were unfurnished tenants, 9% were furnished tenants and the rest were service tenants, etc. Indeed nearly half of all the rented dwellings in the state were in the Dublin subregion. In Dublin a great many owner-occupied dwellings had been obtained through tenant purchase which under one guise or another has character- ized Irish public housing since the 1920s. Nationally in the four-year period 1975- 79, 29 OOO local authority dwellings were sold. Recently Dublin has been selling as many dwellings as it has built. The present scheme allows a sitting tenant to purchase at a price based on historic costs adjusted for price changes and with a discount depending on length of tenancy. These are sales to sitting tenants under Section 90 of the Housing Act, 1966. There are also options to purchase or rent schemes, purchase of dwellings built for sale by the local authorities, and special loans and subsidies for public sector tenants purchasing private houses.

Sales to sitting tenants have a particular effect in Dublin. As Bannon et ul. say:


Well intentioned though it was, the operation of this scheme can be seen to have con- tributed to the number on the waiting list. Those who require a specific location for whatever reasons, are faced with a declining number of available units and a limited choice of location as well. Public housing availability is confmed almost entirely to the very edge of the urban area and the sales policy means that the Local Authority is left with the poorest element in its dwelling stock - those it cannot sell. . . The effect of these pur- chases are firstly to encourage a process of gentrification within Local Authority Areas and secondly to reduce the availability of intra-urban ‘cottage’ dwellings to low income families, except where L.A. dwellings are unattractive to prospective purchasers (1981, 283).

Thls is not a mass issue in Dublin. As Joanne Murphy-Lawless says:

Even the National Association of Tenants’ Organizations, far from objecting to home purchase from local authority stock, sees its work as the extension and protection of the differential rents scheme alongside the tenant purchase scheme (1 980,6).

A referee commenting on the first draft of this paper made the point that the popularity of home ownership and state policy in this regard in Ireland may have much to do with the establishment of peasant proprietership between 1880 and 1920 and the transition of the ideology surrounding this to the urban environ- ment where it became an ideology of home ownership. This view has much to commend it.

In this context Dublin City Corporation has developed a housing management practice called the ‘Open areas’ scheme. Under the Dublin points scheme more points are needed for houses than for flats and localities have different points requirements. In the flatted ‘open areas’ which are the exact equivalent of UK ‘Difficult to let’ estates, access is easy and as Bannon et al. comment, these are: ‘. . .’ available to any class of tenant including those with a hstory of social and other problems (1981, 2851). T h is the classic scenario for the construction of stigmatized ghettoes. This paper is about housing policy and division within the working class. Of

course in a paper based on Dublin material it is somewhat silly to talk about the ‘new’ residuum. As Geddes said in his evidence to the 1913 inquiry: ‘You have a more numerous submerged class than anywhere else I know’ (Report, 1914320).

Dublin always was a city of the residuum. It only ceased to be that for a brief moment in the 1960s. Now it is back. Yet the city and its residuum have some interesting characteristics. With the exception of the travelling people, who are outwith the consideration of this paper, there are no ethnic, cultural or working- class religious minorities in Dublin. It is a homogeneously Irish city.

The divisions that exist within the social and spatial order are ‘pure’. They come from the interaction of place in production and spatial location in consequence of housing policy and from nothing else. And the Dublin situation is interesting in another way. Urban Ireland (from my point of view at least) exhibits a ‘deformed’ version of politics. The working class has never organized for itself and achieved hegemonic status of however limited a form (limited both in time and space). In the north (see Byrne, 1978) certainly class pressure post-1945 had the most profound effect on housing policy. In the south Pfretschner was able to conclude (and in my view not wrongly) that:

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There is no evidence of nay sort that any Irish Government from the time of the treaty undertook housing policy to comply with social-democratic norms. Socialist values, if they were held to by many Dail members, were seldom articulated in the debates over housing and certainly never found their way into any statements of official Government policy (1965,201.

For Pfretzschner, it was all a matter of pragmatic response to need. That may have been an exaggeration. Certainly Fianna Fail set out to buy the support of the urban working class in the 1930s and housing provision was part of the bribe, but the threat in the south has never been from Labour, as the NILP was certainly a threat to Unionist hegemony in the north in the 1950s and 1960s. In Dublin the working class is only just beginning to act collectively in relation to the state through the PAYE and PRSI campaigns, although in fairness it must be said that individual socialist figures, e.g. Dr Noel Brown, have asserted reproductive issues. However, as with the latest ‘Community’ TD Tony Gregory, they have done so within a framework which reinforces the case-based clientilism of Irish politics. If you want a house, you go to the TD or Councillor. In return for help, you vote for them. Clientilism encompasses everything from corruption to simple case advocacy. It does not lead to collective class politics.

Dublin’s urban politics in the twentieth century are not well recorded. How- ever, what is very noticeable is the continued survival of an exceptionally strong petit bourgeoisie and in particular of the ‘urban bourgeoisie’ elements in this class fraction. The importance of this group functioning as urban landlords was recorded by the Vice-Regal Commission in 1913. Landlordism, although much reduced in Dublin, is still extant. A recent report by Threshold (O’Brien and Dillon, 1982) has documented the new (and typical) role of private renting as the housing locale of non-family households. Indeed a landlords’ organization has recently succeeded in having Irish rent control legislation declared unconstitutional in that it infringed upon the property rights guaranteed in the Government of Ireland Act 1919 and incorporated in successive versions of the Irish constitution. Curry has remarked that:

Until recently one of the more noticeable features of Irish society has been the preeminence of Catholic social teaching. In the past this emphasised the principle of sub- sidiarity, i.e. that the state should not undertake functions which could be fulfiied by individuals on their own or by the local community, and that the state function should be to supplement not supplant (1980,5).

In fact this is Irish rather than catholic. Until the necessity of accommodating with the welfarist aspirations of the protestant working class post-1945 led to changes, the ‘protestant state for a protestant people’ statelet of Northern Ireland, had no effective development control legislation, on the grounds that this would be an unacceptable interference with the rights of private property.

Whatever its origin, the political culture in Ireland has little socialist and not much collectivist content. Private landlordism is a residual and specializing sector. Urban bourgeois activity is not. In Dublin this takes two forms, one having to do with land speculation based on change of use of inner-city sites towards profitable commercial activity and the other involving the rezoning of previously agricultural


land on the urban periphery for housing purposes. In the inner city a crucial use change has been from tenement residential to office. Although Dublin’s property boom is now in disarray (for example, the Gallagher Group went bust in the summer of 1982 in consequence of site value collapses), the process of urban renewal has severely affected inner Dublin. One particularly nasty example is provided by Dublin City Corporation plans for a 20acre designated area in the central north city which involved the demolition of 724 corporation flats and their replacement with parks, carparks (very important in enhancing adjacent commercial values), some commercial development and 60 town houses. Although this plan was somewhat modified under pressure from the affected communities, it illustrates the general priorities of the Corporation at this time (see Malone and Geoghan, 1982).

At the urban periphery the key issue has been the major gains made by land- owners from suburban development. Although this is not centrally related to the theme of this paper, the failure of Irish government to establish a coherent land policy is yet another illustration of preeminence of market/property values in political culture! This brief history of Dublin urban policy is very superficial and incomplete.

For example, the issue of contemporary land speculation and the relationship between political parties and property speculators at the national and local level is alone worthy of much more detailed discussion. However, I have presented this avowedly sketchy account to illustrate two related themes. The first is the continuing importance of the residuum in Dublin and the way in which housing policy has been concerned with the management of this group. The second is the extent of ‘recommodification’ of housing (see Harloe, 1981) in a society where despite largemde public housing development for groups other than the residuum, there was little political backing at a cultural level for social housing forms. In this respect industrial trade unions despite their considerable saliency in economistic areas have little cultural tradition in relation to reproductive politics. What I suppose I want to emphasize here is that recommodification is particularly associated with restructuring of the working class and the peripheralization of large parts of it. As Dublin shows, this is not new, but is particularly important in contemporary circumstances. I must now turn to the contemporary spatial expression of all this.

I1 Class and space in Dublin

In describing the organization of space and class in Dublin I am going to draw very heavily upon Report No. 55 of the National Economic and Social Council:

6 question has now emerged as wry important in both local and national politics in Dublin with the idmtiflcation of the role played by leading national political fuures in land speculation on the Dublin periphery. TMs is a clear illustration of the instrumental element in the politics of the Irish state and would merit detailed investigation, although further consideration is not possible in this paper.

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Problems of growth and decay in Dublin (Bannon et al., 1981). Section I1 of this consists of an examination of Dublin’s ‘Social areas’ using data drawn from the 1971 census which was input into a combination of Principle Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis as a way of constructing a typology of social areas. There are some problems with this study. Its data base was old (although the most recent available) and the units of analysis were whole wards which meant that the ability to discriminate among social areas was rather crude; something which was particularly significant in the important case of the Ballymun area. Nonetheless, the pic- ture of Dublin produced is interesting and informative.

In all Bannon and his cowriters identified 6 social areas and 20 subareas as indicated in Table 4. I want to concentrate on subareas 1,4, 15 and 16. In Table 5 I have extracted available details for each of these subareas from the NESC Report. In these subareas live 142000 people or 18% of the population of the Dublin Metropolitan Area. Table 5 gives some indication of the character of these subareas. Let me flesh this out with summaries of Bannon el al.3 descriptions.

Table 4 List of social areas and subareas

lnmrr City Areas i Lowest status area ii Skilled, family housing area iii Private Rented areas iv Terraced housing estates v Areas transitional to flats

vii Old, institutional populations

Twilight areas

Flatland viii Older furnished flats ix Emerging flatland x High status flatland xi Southside High Status

xii Notthside High Status xiii Newer High Status xiv Older mixed tenancies xv New estates xvi New Flat complexes

xvii Newer mixed tenancies xvii Low status areas xix Older mixed areas xx High status areas

Old middleclass suburbs

Local Authority Suburbs

New Ownar-Ocarpied suburbs

Note: Titles are relative within subareas. Source: Bannon e t el., 1981,81, Table 2.2.).

Table 5 is constructed from various tables in Bannon et al. (1981) Section 11. It is incomplete because the tables are selective. The figures are indices with the corresponding figure for the Dublin Metropolitan Area being 100.

Submeu I contained five wards and 15473 people in 1971. On most of the ‘poverty’ indicators th is area must be regarded as the most deprived area in 1971. Unemployment, low skills, low educational achievement were relatively more concentrated here than in the city as a whole (1981,105).

4 14 Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class

Table 5

Subarea 1 4 15 16

Characteristics of selected subareas

Population 15 473 41 728 23 999 62 967 Unskilled Males 288.0 School leavers 16- 19 41.5 Households < 2 rooms 370.1 2 6 Person Households 72.4 119.3 238.9 Unemployment 335.2 115.8 143.0 166.1 Rented LA 239.9 221.2 317.3

Subarea 4 was identified by greater concentrations of children, the unemployed, the unskilled and in many ways has much the same attributes of deprivation as were un- covered in inner-city wards of Social Area 1. Housing was mainly of 1900-1940 vintage and much was rented from the Local Authority. Housing size appears to be in the 3-5 room category, while household size was large. On all the general indicators of deprivation this area appears to be low status (1981,107). Submeu 15 . . . The most striking feature of this subarea is the high incidence of multiple dwelling units and a very young population . . . Because the Ballymun complex is divided between three wards and each ward contains large elements of private housing, the full impact of the area is lost by averaging (1981,112). Subareu 16 . . . The low occupational status of males, along with the high incidence of unemployment and the low school attendance of 14-19 year olds could auger greater social problems in the future (1981,113).

I regard these areas as being the locale in space of Dublin’s residuum population. In practice this ‘reserve space’ consists of two elements - the declining inner city and the rapidly growing peripheral out-estates. One, the inner city, is declining in population. The other, the peripheral out-estates is growing rapidly. Both contain large amounts of public-sector housing and this public-sector housing is the ‘mass housing’ type (Dunleavy, 1981). In the inner-city subarea 1 more than t h e e quarters of all dwellings are in multidwelling buildings and a very large proportion of these are in Local Authority and ‘society’ flatted blocks. Many of the dwellings were overcrowded by Irish standards with nearly half of the total population living at more than two persons per room and 60% of all overcrowding occurring in Local Authority dwellings. Separate occupational data for subarea 1 is not available but in the inner city as a whole 24% of all occupied males were classified as labourers or unskilled workers with a further 20% in transport and communi- cations. These two groups make up 25% of the occupied males in the Dublin subregion. For occupied females 26% were in ‘textiles, clothing and low-skilled factory work’ (Bannon et al., 1981, 170), with a further 20% in services. White-collar females were greatly underrepresented.

The 1971 data was updated by a 1979 survey which showed that while the occupational structure in the inner city remained as much as in 1971, this con- trasted with the massive growth in ‘Information industry’ employment in the Dublin subregions as a whole over the same period. The unemployment rate for males had increased from 9.3% to 12.1% of the population.

The material for the suburban estates is less thoroughly presented in NESC Report 55 than is the material for the inner city. However, a reasonable summary of what is said is represented by two quotations:

BauidByme 415

The populations of these areas is dominated by the very young, few old people and it contrasts sharply with the demographic structure of the Inner City (Bannon etal., 1981, 100.

The Local Authority estates covered by this survey reveal a serious concentration of social and economic problems in many ways reminiscent of the problems of inner city households (Bannon er d., 1981,231).

It should be noted that in Dublin in 1971 on the basis of the data presented by Bannon et al. many parts of these areas could not be classified as truly residuum but my observation of them in the summer of 1982, observations based in no small part on my ultimately successful expedition to Coolock in an effort to recover my car which had been stolen, suggest that by that date ‘peripheralization’ was virtually complete. These were the areas of high car theft, extensive petty crime and visible vandalism. Certainly in contemporary Dublin folklore they are classified in a way which exactly resembles Glaswegian identification of certain peripheral estates as the ‘Wild West’. I spent a lot of time talking to people in Dublin about this sort of thing, principally in pubs and on buses. This ethnography was opportunistic and unsystematic but it absolutely confirmed that what Bannon et al. had identified in statistical terms corresponded with popular cultural conceptions. People in Dublin saw these areas in the way in which I have described them.

The point I am making here is that statistical description and popular culture correspond in asserting the distinctiveness of these locales. That means they are seen as different in contrast to other areas, that is to the housing and spatial location of the rest of the working class in Dublin.

If we go through Bannon et aL’s subarea data we find that the following subareas might be regarded as locales of the non-residuum working class: Subarea 3 - Inner city - the inner city skilled working class. Subarea 5 - ‘This subarea has many of the attributes of a settled working class community’ (p. 108). Subarea 9 - Low status flatland. Subarea 14 - Older good council housing. Subarea 18 - New cheap owner occupation.

In fact these areas shade into white-collar areas. Dublin has a very large white collar proletariat. In summary description the non-residuum worlung class live in cottage housing in the inner city and in cheaper north side terrace housing and cheap owner-occupied housing, a good deal of which has been purchased through tenant purchase schemes. None of these boundaries are precise and there is a dynamic which as we shall see is leading to boundary collapse. Nonetheless these descriptions have some temporary heuristic value.

Subareas, 3, 5, 9, 14 and 18 contained altogether 214954 people or 17.7% of the total population of the Dublin urban area. This collection of subareas, although differing in important attributes, notably age of adults and tenure, rep- resents the locale of the ‘traditional working class’. Subareas 6,10, 17 and 19 were not markedly different from this subset, except that the housing within them was more likely to be owner-occupied and they contained a larger proportion of white-


collar and professional workers. Indeed the spatial division between the ’respectable’ traditional working class and the ‘white-collar’ working class was not strongly defined in Bannon et al.’s analysis, which may be an artefact of the size of their units of analysis (whole wards), but is more likely to be a reflection of the reality of the spatial expression of relations between the two groups. It is the residuum who are tightly separated off.’

In this respect, as in so many others, Dublin can be seen as a divergent development from the common form it possessed with so many British cities, preindepend- ence. By this I do not mean that Dublin was not markedly different from British cities in 1919, but rather that Dublin provides an example of how a city developed when its political and administrative logic did not undergo a marked change, as was the case for all British cities post-1919. Dublin is rather like London, but it is not London, not least (but also not only), because London has a long history of socialist municipal government with important consequences for the spatial arrange- ment of classes and class fractions, although the limitations of the effectiveness of such political factors are also revealed by a comparison of how alike Dublin and London remain in these respects.

111 Conclusion

Let me attempt some general analysis of all this. In an earlier paper, Don Parson and myself asserted that a crucial component of the contemporary social order is represented by the processes through which the state is involved both in the hierarchical fragmentation of the working class and in the management of the consequences of that fragmentation (Byrne and Parson, 1983). All this is occurring in relation to underdevelopment understood in the autonomist sense as described by Cleaver:

. . . development and underdevelopment are understood here neither as the outcome of historical processes (as bourgeois economists recount) nor as the processes themselves (as many marxists use the terms). They are rather two different sfrufegfes by which capital seeks to control the working class . . . they are always co-existent because hierarchy is the key to capital‘s control and development is always accompanied by relative or absolute underdevelopment for others in order to maintain that hierarchy. . . By development I mean a strategy in which working class income is raised in exchange for more work.. . The alternative strategy, in which income is reduced in order to impose the availability of work, I call a strategy of underdevelopment (1977,94).

We see the massive growth of the stagnant reserve army in industrial capitalism, what Friend and Metcalf call the ‘surplus population’ (1918,119), as being a consequence of this strategy and we see ghettoization in the public sector and associated

’ It has to be emphasized that the logic of the account of ’underdevelopment’ which I present in the conclusion to this piece suggests that more and more of Dublin’s working class are being pushed over this divide, but this does not alter the fact that the wuospatial boundary between the respectable and residuum working class is tight while that between the respectable working class and the white-collar working ckss is scarcely visible.

DavidByme 417

housing management practices as being techniques for the control of this ghettoized fraction. To quote again:

Capital maintains its hegemony . . . by the hierarchical fragmentation of the working class, spatially as well as through intra-class divisions of other sorts (waged-unwaged, central- peripheral, etc.). In such a manna large working class areas of the city exist as little more than a multiplicity of private households with little or no contact with one another, alongside the ‘communities’ which have solidaristic relationships. Development co-exists with under-development as a strategy for enforcing this spatial fragmentation. At this level we see the emagence of a hierarchy of communities, differentiated by autonomous political and reproductive power that is posed against capital’s in the sense that a particular segment of the labour market is concentrated and in fact immobilized in space by various social controls and constraints (Byme and Parson, 1983,23).

In the UK coercive case-work based housing management on the Octavia Hill model is associated with the ‘difficult to let’ ghettoes, and Parson (1982) has demonstrated the role of urban renewal and housing management in public housing in Los hgeles as being linked in the same way, Essentially we are dealing with a situation in which the system based ‘peripheralization’ of inner-city working-class populations in relation to production is associated with spatial peripheralization which has its origins in the value dynamic of inner-urban land.’ Once the people are relocated there is a major problem in managing them: given the absence of a central discipline of labour. In other words management on a detailed day to day base arises to replace the sort of control represented by having to go to work. This is not to say that the destruction of solidaristic central communities by peripheralization is not itself a strategy of management. I am referring here to management in the new location where case or client-based escape mechanisms are an important way of destroying the basis for collective social action around housing and other reproductive issues. What I frnd remarkable about Dublin is how closely it fits this model, despite its separate urban and political history. The ‘residuum’ population has been concentrated in public sector accommodation, differentiated both by location and form (that is flats as opposed to houses). Much of the residuum has been relocated from the inner city to periphery, in part to free inner-city cites for a property boom. To some degree the residuum population is the basis of ‘special branches of accumulation’, certainly of a thriving service centred black economy in

‘What I am getting at here is the interrelationship between the capital4ogic of land rent and the labour process in the inner city. When labour becomes lesa necessary in the inner city, in consequence of deindustrialization, capital intensification, etc., or where it is easy to transport spatially peripheral labour into central working locales, or in practice through a combination of these processes, then the working-class people who are the source of that labour power can be spatially disposueased by development proasses fueled through the exchange value of the sites on which they live. I have been thinking about this and feel that it is worth n o w that in all the literature on this topic, I can recollect no example of a politicoindustrially cenml working- class community being dicporaessed when the spatial location of its residence was important in relation to the work of its members.

4 18 Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class

the city centreg and of low-wage immigrant plants employing mainly female labour in the periphery.

What is perhaps most significant about Dublin is the way in which it illustrates the significance of a political scenario in whch the link between the politics of production and reproduction is weak or broken. In Dublin the type of working- class political culture which is based on occupational community and class politics derived from that experience has never achieved even partial hegamonic status. It has always been subordinate to nationalist and religious elements, and that subordination is of course in itself largely basal in origin given the absence of central status which has been the general historical position of Dublin’s worlung class. I would describe the collectivist clientelism” expressed by some left politicians in this sort of context as ‘degenerate’. Thus Tony Gregory, the ‘community socialist’ TD for the north inner city, was in the business of attempting to extract a El00 million investment package from Haughey, leader of Fianna Fail in return for Gregory’s role in the election of the Taoiseach in a hung Dail. Needless to say the bribe was not paid when Haughey’s government fell this year. Gregory’s political base was essentially an alliance of community social workers and their clients. There is nothing wrong in wanting more money for the poor in Dublin. The point is that to be reduced to the state of political dependency represented by Gregory’s strategy, is to be far behmd the traditional transformational politics of European socialist/communist parties (e.g. British Labour, PCI), whch have in the past been either the ultimate or the transitional political strategies of a left in which production and reproduction have been linked.

Dublin ought to be a familiar story to US readers. If it is not one to northern European, and especially British readers, then in my view it is going to be. I am very much disturbed by the extent to which the politics of the heartland locales of British labourism in Clydeside and Tyneside let alone London and Liverpool (which have a historic production base far closer to that of Dublin than the mining/ship- building/heavy engineering of the northeast and west central Scotland), are coming to be like Dublin (see Byrne, 1982). Only in Sheffield is there any sign of a reproductive politics which has some connection (and that connection is weakening), to the production-located political structures of the working class. Of course I am

My evidence for this is again largely ethnographic. People I talked to told me about this and about their own roles in it. Here it is worth noting that in catering there is a history of unionization in Dublin and that in the restaurant trade in particular fierce unionization campaigns have been fought against the logic of the role of the residuum in this section. Nonetheless there is a lot of ‘scab’ and/or casual work in catering in Dublin centre. I was offered some of it! l o A referee commented on this paper to the effect that there is a developed political science literature on Ireland in which comparisons are made between Ireland, Greece, southern Italy, etc. The comment and the comparisons are both well made but it is worth noting that clientelism is generally discussed in its rural variant and that the ‘left clientelism’ which substitutes for social democratic or communist politics is not discussed. I am making comparisons with the northern industrial cities with which I am familiar. Clearly Dublin has a lot in common with, for example, Athens.

David Byrne 4 19

describing the effects of, and reasons for, crisis. The underdevelopment of the working class has of necessity to proceed on all fronts, even if unevenly (com- bined and uneven underdevelopment!). Dublin is an illustration of how bad it can get when things are relatively simple. The question is how to make things happen differently.

IV References

Ballymun Amenities Group 1972: Report of a social survey. Dublin. Bannon, M. and Eustace, J.G. 1978: The role of the tertiary section in regional

Bannon, M., Eustace, J.G. and O'Neill, M. 1981: NESC, Report No. 38. Ireland:

Braverman, M. 1974: Labour and monopoly capital. New York: Monthly Review

Byrne, D. 1978: Housing in Belfast. Belfast: Ulster Polytechnic. (Mimeo.)

policy. Ireland: EEC.

EEC.

Press.

1982: Class and the local state. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6,61-82.

Byme, D. and Parsons, D. 1984: The state and the reserve army - the management of class relations in space. In Anderson, J., Duncan, s. and Hudson, R., editors, Redundant spaces? London: Academic Press.

Cleaver, H. 1977: Malaria: politics of public health and international crisis. Review of RadicalPoliticalEconomy 9,81-123.

Curry, J . 1980: The Irish social services. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Cowan, P.C. 1918: Report on htblin housing. Dublin: Cahill & Co. Daly, M. 1981 : Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dublin. In Harkness, D.

and O'Dowd, M., editors, The town in Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Department of Local Government 1976: Current trends and policies in the fierci of

housing, building and planning. Dublin: Stationery Office. Dublin Planning Department 1975: Housing requirements ofthe Dublin subregion,

Working Paper No. 10, Dublin. Dunleavy, P. 1981: The politics of mass housing in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon

Press. Friedman, A. 1977: Industry and labour. London: Macmillan. Friend, A. and Metcalf, A. 1981 : Slump city. London: Pluto. Harloe, M. 1981: The recommodification of housing. In Harloe, M. and Lebas, E.,

editors, City, class and capital, London: Edward Arnold. Kennedy, S. editor, 1981 : One million poor. Dublin: Tuhoe Press. Lyons, F.S.L. 1981 : Ireland since the famine. London: Fontana. Malone, F. and Geoghan, D. 1982: After the blitz. New Deal March/April. Marx, K. 1976: Gzpital Vol. 1 , Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murphy-Lawless, J. 1980: Some aspects of home ownership in Ireland. Trinity

College, Dublin. (Mimeo.)


NESC 1981 : Urbanization: problems of growth and decay in hrblin. Report No.

O’Brien, L. and Dillon, B. 1982: M a t e rented. Dublin: Threshold. O‘connor, D. 1979: Housing in Dublin’s inner city. Housing Research Unit, School

of Architecture, University College, Dublin. O’Reilly, B. 1967: The Ballymun housing project. In Proceedings of TPI Confer-

ence, Dublin, May, 1967. Parson, D. 1982: The urban crisis: urban renewal and the class struggle. University

of California at Los Angeles. (Mimeo.) Perrons, D. 1979: The role of Ireland in the new international division of labour.

Working Paper 15, Urban and Regional Studies, University of Sussex. Pfretscher, PA. 1965: The dynamics of Irish housing. Dublin: Institute of Public

Administration. Wickham, D. 1980: The politics of dependent capitalism. International capital

and the national state. In Morgan, A. and Purdie, P., editors, Ireland: divided nution - divided class, London: Ink L i n k s .

5 5 , Dublin: Stationery Office.

L’article consiste en une description de la ville de Dublin aujourdhui, au niveau de son urbanisa- tion: problkmes de croissance et de d6clin. qui convergent sur le syst2me de logement dans la ville/r6gion et en particulier sur I’enmagasinage des rbsidus. L’histoire de l’intervention de 1’Ctat dans le logement B Dublin est expo& dans ses grandes lignes et la structure socio-spatiale contemporaine telle qu’elle est d6crite dansl’ouvrage de Bannon et autres est I%e B cek L’article se termine par un essai pour placer Dublin dans le contexte d’une processus g6nQal de sous- dkveloppement de la clam ouvrikre dans lequel les agences d’6tat et spticialement les politiques d’espace de ‘relocation’ de telles agences servent de m6canisme principal pour un tel sow- dkeloppement. Ce sowdkveloppement est li6 au caractkre de la culture politique de Dublin et des conclusions pessimistes sont tirks en ce qui concerne l’implication pour la situation de la politique de la classe ouvriire, dans laquelle, comme A Dublin, les lignes entre la politique productive et reproductive sont faibles ou bris6es.

Der Aufstaz ist eine Beschreibung des zeitgenossischen Dublin im Hinblick auf seine Urbanisa- tion: Wachstums- und Verfallsprobleme, der sich auf das Behausungssystem der Stadt/Region konzentriert und vor allem die Behausung des Residuums Der historische Hintergrund der staatlichen Einmischung in Dublins Wohnungsbaupolitik wird umrissen und in Relation zu der gegenwiirtigen Sozial-Raumstruktur, wie in der Arbeit von Bannon et a t bescluieben, gesebt. Der A u h t z schliel3t mit dem Versuch, Dublin in den Kontext eines allgemeinen Unterent- wicklungsprozesses der Arbeiterklasse zu setzen, in dem der Staat und vor allem die ‘Umsied- lungspolitik’ der staatlichen Behorden einen Hauptfaktor fiir eine derartige Unterentwicklung darstellt. Diese Unterentwicklung wird in Relation zu dem Charakter der politischen Kultur Dublins betrachtet, und es folgt eine pessimistische SchMfolgerUng iiber die Auswirkungen fiir eine Wohnpolitik der Arbeiterklasse, beider - wie in Dublin - die Grenze zwischen produktiver und reproduktiver Politik diinn oder nicht vorhanden ist.

La ponencia consiste de una descripcidn del Dublin contempodneo, en thminos de su ‘Urban- izacidn: problemas de aecimiento y deterioro’, con el enfoque en el sistema de viviendas de la ciudad y regidn y en particular, el alojamiento del residuo. Se bosqueja la historia de la vivienda de Dublin, y se describe la estructura socio-espacial contempodnea, sew la obra de Bannon et al. La ponencia termina con una tentativa de colocar a Dublin en el contexto de un proceso general de ‘infradesarrollo’ de la clase trabajadora, en el cud las agendas del estado y especial- mente las pollticas e-es de hueva ubicacidn’ de tales agencias &en como un importante mecanismo para semejante Ynfradeumollo’. Este ’infradeaarrollo’ se ~ l a c i o ~ al caracter de la cultura polltica de Dublin, %+&dose condusiones pesimistas sobre la implicacidn para la polit- ica de situacidn de la clase trabajadora en la cual, como en Dublin. las lineas entre politicas productoras y reproductoras son d6biles o se han roto.

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Dublin — a case study of housing and the residual working class