Dublin slums a disgrace to UK, House of Lords is told

London, 25 July 1919 - The House of Lords has been told that before the government introduced an Irish housing bill, it should first have brought forward a bill dealing specifically with Dublin, as its slums were ‘a disgrace to the United Kingdom’.

That is the view of Lord Mayo who was speaking during the second reading of the Irish housing bill in the House of Lords yesterday.

In moving the bill the Lord Chancellor, F.E. Smith, explained that it was largely urban in its focus as the issue of rural housing in Ireland had been dealt with separately under the Labourer Acts, which had provided, he asserted, 50,000 houses with suitable plots.

The Lord Chancellor acknowledged that the urban housing problem in Ireland was very serious and referenced the Irish Convention’s estimate that around 67,000 new working class houses were required.

It was noted that this housing bill had the distinction of being welcomed in the House of Commons by both unionist and nationalist Irish MPs, a most unusual occurrence.

Supporting the bill, Lord Mayo agreed with the Lord Chancellor’s comments on the Dublin situation, adding:

‘The working classes and the poor in that town live in the most wretched way. They live in houses which were built for gentlefolk in the eighteenth century. They are totally unsuitable, and the sanitary arrangements are practically nil.’

‘It is a town which is a disgrace, and if the government do not see that it is properly dealt with will be a very serious matter. The people there live in a filthy state, and people who are badly housed are the prey of every sort of agitator, and of every kind of wickedness you can imagine connected with agitation.’

The committee stage for the bill was fixed for Thursday 31 July.

[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.]