As president of the Architects Association of Ireland in 1948, Desmond FitzGerald suggested: “It is possible that if public interest in architecture is lacking, it will be produced in such a rarefied atmosphere that it will gasp for breath amid subtleties of interest only to architects themselves. If this should happen, illusion and vulgarity will readily fill the place – illusion to meet the nostalgia of some and vulgarity the aspirations of others.”
FitzGerald’s assertions underlined some of the challenges facing those designing buildings during the infant decades of this state: how to find the right balance between innovation, respect for heritage and the demands of urban expansion, and also to prioritise local needs while allowing international influence to breathe.
The challenges became even more acute with population and economic expansion and the disdain shown towards Ireland’s Georgian heritage. The historian Kevin B Nowlan, central to the campaigns to preserve Dublin’s heritage from the 1960s by establishing with others the Dublin Civic Group, recalled his growing alarm that “Dublin was being destroyed in the cause of a debased nationalism that saw its Georgian houses as the relics of British rule in Ireland”.
Deirdre Kelly, founder of the Living City Group in 1970, became a vigorous opponent of Dublin community displacement in the name of “progress”. By the end of that decade, there was an additional focus: Dublin Corporation’s plan to build its headquarters on top of a medieval street system at Wood Quay created a storm that gave heritage a new political edge.
This heightened awareness and the details he exposed of decades of greed, ignorance and corruption made Frank McDonald’s 1985 book The Destruction of Dublin a bestseller. McDonald, who died last week, devoted his career to teasing out planning, heritage and environmental challenges, as a champion of city living, and he vigorously held those who failed them to account. He was an impressive warrior, full of wrath, humanity, wit and research. In 2000, Nowlan referred to McDonald’s “nice sense of battlefield humour”. He launched McDonald’s third book on Dublin that year, The Construction of Dublin, which was dedicated to Deirdre Kelly. Significantly, it was launched at the Dublin Civic Offices at Wood Quay, suggesting a thaw in the relationship between McDonald and the Corporation.
The cumulative impact of the campaigns from the 1960s ensured that by the time the municipal authority had moved into the civic offices in 1995, there was, in the words of historian of Dublin David Dickson, “a shift from those whose primary concern was traffic management, road widening, car parks, main drainage and housing provision to the softer issues of inner-city regeneration and heritage management”. He added: “Where once it had been accountants, road engineers and surveyors, the influence of architects, town planners and environmental engineers belatedly came to the fore . . . mistakes were made and opportunities lost, but a new sense of Dublin as a place of international consequence, liberated from British comparison, finally prevailed.”
Despite some improvements, McDonald did not lose his critical bite. In looking back at plans from the 1960s that promised balanced regional development, he lamented the continued overwhelming dominance of Dublin. He also highlighted the scale of the rezoning decisions by Dublin County Council that were “contaminated by corruption” in the early 1990s. Later, with Celtic Tiger economic expansion and building in the city, he noted: “The pace of change is so spectacular that nobody has a handle on it. Not Dublin Corporation, not the banks or property developers, nor even the government.”
The impact on quality of life was a recurrent theme for McDonald; local authorities opted for a “motorised city . . . in which transport would play no more than a residual role”. He gave credit too, praising some of the city’s public projects such as the Liffey boardwalk, the remaking of Smithfield, the restoration of City Hall and the Ha’penny Bridge “after decades of bureaucratic torpor”. He welcomed a “renewed sense of Dublin as a European capital”. But recovering lost housing stock was down the list of priorities.
McDonald, like Nowlan and Kelly, had an acute appreciation for how the city evolved and what it had going for it if managed well: it had “a glorious planning history, going back to the era of the 1st Duke of Ormonde [in the 17th century] who left Dublin such great legacies as the Phoenix Park, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the Liffey quays. And Ormonde was followed in the 18th century by the Wide Streets Commission, which created the Georgian streets and squares in collaboration with the landed gentry, to make Dublin one of the most splendid cities in Europe.”
This was not about nostalgia: “We have inherited a great, well-planned city. And although much of it has been treated harshly over the past century, enough of its fabric still survives to make Dublin well worth fighting for.”