Between 1970 and 1990 Dublin was in a very bad place. The population in central areas had declined to half the levels recorded in the 1940s, with little prospect of recovery. After the 1973 oil crisis, grants of IR£600 were being handed out to convert home heating systems to carbon-intensive solid fuel burning. The money could even be had for a chimney retrofit on newly built “all electric” homes.
Suburban shopping centres were in their infancy, and often viewed as a risky commercial investment. Sunday trading was still a pipe dream, with Arnotts, as late as 1994, still reluctant to bow to competitor peer pressure to open on the day of rest.
Other aspects of Dublin’s development, explored by the geographer Joseph Brady in this engaging latest instalment in The Making of Dublin City series, are all too familiar. Planning policy was aspirational and developer-led. Formulating a vision for the capital’s transport infrastructure was moving at a snail’s pace, involving exhaustive analysis of competing priorities such as orbital and tangent motorways versus bus and rail networks. Local government reform was trapped in an endless round of reviews, much like the latest plans to establish a citizens’ assembly to consider a directly elected mayor for the city.
Brady approaches his analysis through the honed eye of an urban geographer, with themes such as suburban expansion, city-centre decay, urban renewal, population and governance explored with the assistance of maps and contemporary photographs. The dominance of the private car, and its power to shape lives, landscapes and devour public funds, is an overarching thread. This emerges at the outset with Dublin corporation’s introduction of parking meters in January 1970, operating initially in busy areas between 8.30am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday (even though wardens only started their shifts at 10am). This followed a decade of “dithering” on how to deal with the sea of suburban cars being abandoned all day on city streets. The meters, soon rolled out in all of the city centre, were one of the few successes of the period, in spite of being regularly sabotaged by jamming matchsticks or full-on sledgehammer decapitation.
The Schaechterle report of 1965 was one of the first studies of Dublin’s traffic network. Traffic counts recorded a worrying 66 per cent increase in volumes across the city-centre boundary between 1961 and 1971. The upward trajectory in car ownership and car use, recorded and predicted by the Schaechterle report, and which played out in ensuing decades, was to have a critical long-term effect on the shape of Dublin. Suffocating congestion and aggressive road engineering cast a pall over policy, prospective development lands, and much of the historic city’s streets and spaces — plus its air quality. It also committed generations of Dubliners in new suburbs, such as Tallaght and Finglas, to a life of car dependency due to the absence of realistic public transport options.
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So dominant was this motoring culture, whose rise was considered unstoppable, that Dublin corporation adopted a policy of damage limitation. Multistorey car parks were encouraged as a means of getting cars off the streets while keeping suburbanites’ spending power in the city core. Acres of surface car parks were facilitated on vacant lots where buildings used to be, notably on the sites of Brooks Thomas and Noyeks on Parnell Street, and on other industrial sites whose predecessors had decamped to the suburbs. The horror of “bombsite” car parks delineated by yellow hoops — a regular feature of the urban experience in this writer’s childhood in the late 1980s — are resurrected by arresting colour photographs of the dismal environs of the Ilac Centre.
Exploring the era at a bracing clip, Brady excels in looking at the physical and social-planning effects of urban regeneration that followed legal changes in the 1980s allowing tax incentives to be given in certain districts to developers, investors and owner-occupiers. The impact was immediate and far reaching. Years of economic stagnation and dereliction gave way to new blocks of residential apartments, stitching the quays and historic streets back together. Brady’s inclusion of their gauche marketing brochures and “before and after” photographic comparisons are an important record of this overlooked phase in Dublin’s development history. He rightly acknowledges that much of the residential and architectural quality was poor and dismally undersized, sustaining rather than reversing a niggling perception of Dublin city centre as a far from family-friendly place in which to live.
Other features of this era, from the inspiring civic work of the Metropolitan Streets Commission to pedestrianisation and the 1980s revival of independent retailers in shopping arcades, provide lessons that we would do well to apply to our shell-shocked, post-pandemic capital today.
Dublin from 1970 to 1990: The City Transformed by Joseph Brady
Four Courts Press €24.95 pp455