Ireland’s renowned, or perhaps infamous, do-it-yourself bungalow began as a one-man cottage industry. In 1971, Jack Fitzsimons self-published a book containing 20 designs that could be used to construct affordable homes. He drove around the country selling copies to anyone who would take them. It was stocked at newsagents, garages, bookshops – anywhere that Fitzsimons’s intended audience might pick it up.
Bungalow Bliss became an instant bestseller, going through 12 editions and eventually selling 250,000 copies – one for every two households in Ireland. Its influence reshaped the landscape of rural Ireland and, as Adrian Duncan – a prolific novelist and short-story writer who is also a trained engineer – argues here, each bungalow was a microcosm of the shifting nature of Irish modernity.
Soon, the houses were everywhere. By the late 1970s, more than 10,000 homes based on the Bungalow Bliss template were being constructed per year, mostly on cheap plots of a 0.5 acres to 0.75 acres, usually facing a road, on the edge of rural towns. Fitzsimons had worked as an electrical fitter for the rural electrification scheme in the 1950s, an engineering draughtsman at the Office of Public Works, and the clerk of works for Meath County Council. While he was working in the latter role, individuals and couples would approach him to ask if he could draw up plans for one-off housing. He saw the need for something like Bungalow Bliss.
The relative simplicity of the plans put the construction of a home in the hands of ordinary people
Fitzsimons knew his audience: lower-to-middle income rural dwellers who needed to keep costs low. All plans in the book were under 116 square metres in area, ensuring that the homeowner qualified for state aid of £300. The book spoke directly to the audience with a degree of humour – Fitzsimons’s title managed to be both tongue-in-cheek and a sincere promise to the reader – and the relative simplicity of the plans put the construction of a home in the hands of ordinary people. It must have been refreshing to be shown how to do it without needing to negotiate the intimidating tastes or prohibitive fees of architects.
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Duncan places the Bungalow Bliss phenomenon in context. The economic expansion undertaken under Taoiseach Seán Lemass led to the growth of industry and technical education. Suburbs expanded and car traffic increased. The new bungalows were the rural counterparts of the new suburban estates at cities’ edges. Duncan applies John McGahern’s description of Irish homesteads as ‘little Republics’ to the Bungalow Bliss–derived dwellings, adding that they were “fractal-like reflections” of the Irish Republic’s modernisation.
How so? Well, Duncan focuses on the widening of the education sector, particularly that provided in regional technical colleges, and the changes in the economy and industry, particularly the role of the Industrial Development Agency in attracting multinationals to rural areas. The growth of industry in these areas meant that those who might in the past have emigrated for work could stay – but they needed somewhere to live.
The bungalow was the traditional Irish cottage transformed by modern materials and an optimistic, individualistic vision. Industrial production crossed paths with traditional neighbourly meitheal: you could call a few friends, draw on their skills, and build a house that might do you for the rest of your life. Fitzsimons intuited this shift in rural society and provided a guidebook.
While fair about the need for reform of the planning system at the time, Duncan is also provocative in his deeper analysis
But the houses didn’t resemble the John Hinde postcards of whitewashed, thatched cottages, and, eventually, that became a problem for some. Fitzsimons’s bungalows were a highly visible symbol of a huge change in rural areas during the very period that tourism was becoming a significant and lucrative industry. Was the countryside to be lived in, or looked at? And who wanted to look at these new bungalows, some perched unsympathetically in beauty spots, plonked there on concrete platforms with little attempt to integrate them into the landscape?
Not many at this newspaper, it must be pointed out. In a pivotal chapter of the book, Duncan discusses the belated metropolitan focus on the Bungalow Bliss phenomenon, drawing on former environment editor Frank McDonald’s three-part Bungalow Blitz broadside against the “blight” of rural bungalows, published in The Irish Times in September 1987. The following month, another article, by then editor Conor Brady, argued that landowners in the west had “no right to destroy a Dubliner’s beautiful Connemara”.
While fair about the need for reform of the planning system at the time, Duncan is also provocative in his deeper analysis. This was an argument between two forms of Irish romanticism: on the one hand, a pragmatic, Lemassian “form-follows-function type of rural modernity” and on the other an idealistic, high-cultural Anglocentric nationalism that recalls the picturesque west of Yeats and Lady Gregory.
Stirring stuff, and I wish Duncan had pursued this a little more, as it opens all sorts of avenues into the fraught question of rural versus urban identity in Ireland. I enjoyed the artfully written one-page interchapters that describe the craft involved in the construction of a house, and his assessment of the future of the Bungalow Bliss houses (they need plenty of retrofitting but will be around for a long time to come).
Duncan occasionally lapses into pages of detailed description that fail to hold the attention. Such instances can distract from his strengths as a writer, which are delivered sparingly but effectively: the poetic moment and the personal angle. Ultimately, Little Republics – daringly, convincingly – places the once-derided rural bungalow at the centre of Irish modernity.
