Ambitious plan for Dublin housing announced

27,000 families need proper homes

Dublin, 14 August 1918 - A major new housing initiative, which will cost £8,640,000 and deliver at least 16,500 additional dwellings for workers, is to be implemented in the city of Dublin.

The plan, which was devised by P.C. Cowan, Chief Engineering Inspector with the Local Government Board and submitted to the Chief Secretary, Edward Shortt, dates from January this year and sets out the following as necessities:

• 14,000 new self-contained houses of sufficient size to enable a separation of sexes, with scullery and WC accommodation for the sole use of each family

• The improvement and remodelling of 3,803 first and second class tenement houses to provide for suitable accommodation, in tenements of one to four rooms, for 13,000 families, with a remaining 5,991 families being catered for in new houses.

Jacinta Prunty explains the origins of the Dublin housing crisis

In all, Mr Cowan states that there is a need to provide comfortable sanitary houses for 27,000 families; this figure was accepted by a Departmental Committee almost four years ago. Since then 936 tenement houses, in which 3,989 families were housed, had been closed by the Corporation. In the same four year period, only 327 new houses had been built.

Selfridge denies Dublin rumours
In other Dublin property news, Gordon Selfridge, owner of the Selfridge department store on London’s Oxford Street has denied rumours that he had acquired premises in Dublin with a view to opening up a business in the city. ‘There is no truth in the statement’, he told a reporter when interviewed at his Oxford Street office. 

[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]