Corporation housing 100 years ago

Sir, – In his column, An Irishman’s Diary (November 2nd), Frank McNally writes that the Fairbrother’s Fields housing development was “the first of the new schemes, in the Liberties”. That’s true. But it was not though the first such scheme built in Dublin city. That honour goes to an address that borders the Liberties: Ceannt Fort.

Consisting of 202 two-storey, mostly two-bedroom houses, work there – on a plot originally called McCaffrey Estate – commenced in 1918 and finished in the same year that gave us Ulysses, Jacob’s Room, and The Wasteland.

The architect brought in by Dublin Corporation to design the scheme was Thomas Joseph Byrne. In his book, John Bull’s Other Homes, Murray Fraser writes “Byrne’s distinctive Arts and Crafts approach can be seen at the McCaffrey Estate in the picturesque, Neo-Vernacular terraces built in yellow stock bricks, and adorned with complex, steeped rooflines punctuated by hips and gables”.

Incidentally the book states that alderman Thomas Kelly, the chairman of the corporation’s housing committee, was initially against the new schemes, preferring instead smaller cottages in a more high density layout, so that more of Dublin’s unskilled labourers could be housed. However this was opposed by, among others, the Dublin Tenter’s League, a body set up by William Larkin (brother of James) who “demanded that nothing but suburban housing should be built for the working classes”.