2.1.7 Dublin in the Early 1900s

In the first half of the 1900s, Ireland’s political status changed through a period of turmoil from the 1916 Easter Rising to the Civil War and the establishment of the Free State and later the Republic in 1948. Dublin’s population rose through the 1900s from just over 400,000 in 1926 to over 1 million in 1980. Nationally the trend was towards an urbanised population.

Dublin remained a compact city at the start of the century but expanded its suburbs significantly to create better housing to accommodate the growth of population. The inner-city slums were gradually cleared and improvement of sanitary conditions through new sewer and waste disposal systems occurred. Slum clearance helped form St Patricks Park, which was opened in July 1902 by Lord Iveagh, (creator of the Iveagh Trust),who actively acquired land with existing tenements which were cleared in order to construct the park.

Town planning emerged during this time, and the recently established Civics Institute held a competition on planning for Dublin, which was won by Sir Patrick Abercrombie in 1914. The Abercrombie plan envisaged river parkways along the Tolka and Camac which are still objectives of contemporary city landscape planning.

Ireland’s first Town and Regional Planning Act was introduced in 1934 and allowed for the preparation of planning schemes that gave power to authorities to reserve lands for parks and open space, however there was little uptake of planning systems until the later 1963 Planning and Development Act.

Waste disposal for Dublin at this time included sea and land dumping. A night time tram was used to dump on Fairview slob lands, which subsequently formed present day Fairview Park