Story of public housing in Tullamore under the spotlight

This month's Offaly History lecture is entitled “From hovels to homes: housing conditions and public housing in Tullamore, 1900-1945 and will be given by Dr Peter Connell.

The lecture takes place at Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore, R35 Y5V0 at 8 pm on Monday, April 15 next.

You can attend in person or via Zoom - for link email  info@offalyhistory.com

At the end of World War II in 1945, 35% or over one-third of private dwellings in Tullamore town had been built by the local urban council.

Over the course of forty years, the town’s housing stock had been transformed from one where hundreds of families lived in over-crowded, dark and insanitary lanes and streets to one where the great majority of the town’s population had the benefit of running water, flush toilets and adequate living space.

The lecture will outline housing conditions in Tullamore in the early years of the twentieth and compare them to conditions in other Irish and British towns. The focus then turns to the various Housing Acts, from the Housing of the Working Classes Act passed in Westminster in 1890 to the 1932 Act passed by the new Fianna Fáil government.

These acts provided the legislative framework through which Tullamore Urban Council could provide public housing. Their implementation, of course, was shaped by politics and economics, both national and local.

The lecture will explore this context, describing how the Irish Parliamentary Party dominated local politics in the early years the century, how the state and the local council struggled to address the housing crisis in the 1920s and how the Fianna Fáil building programme of the 1930s focused on a public health agenda and on what was called ‘slum clearance’.

Over 200 condemned houses were demolished in these years with residents offered tenancies in new estates in Callary St, O’Molloy St and Park Avenue. The lecture will conclude with an assessment of forty years of council housing in Tullamore, its achievements and failures and how Tullamore compared to other Irish provincial towns.

Peter Connell is a native of Navan and has been living in Co Kildare for the past forty years. He is involved in local history in Meath, acting as convenor of the Meath History Workshop, co-editor of  Navan Its People and Its Past, the journal of the Navan and District Historical Society and, since 2015, as editor of  Ríocht na Midhe, the journal of the Meath Archaeological and Historical Society.

In 2004, his book,  The land and people of County Meath, 1750-1850  was published by Fourt Courts Press and he has also contributed to various books and journals on topics ranging from the Great Famine to the history of the public library service. In 2017 he completed a PhD in the History Department in Trinity College Dublin on the provision of public housing in Ireland, 1890-1945.