ABSTRACT
In 1950, the Irish government issued Ireland is Building. Houses and Hospitals , a colourful pamphlet informing the public that during 1949, Dublin Corporation was building 3,219 dwellings and that a further 15,000 houses were planned by the local authority as part of a ten-year programme. A joint initiative of the Departments of Local Government and Public Health, Ireland is Building was designed to lure Irish labourers back from Britain to help realise this extensive building programme (figure I.1). The opening page greets the reader with eye-catching before and after images of Dublin housing: an idealised juxtaposition of ‘the past’ in the form of ramshackle tenement back lands with ‘the present and future’, represented by gleaming white repetitive terraced houses. The contrast was striking and illustrative of a by then familiar dogma underpinning Dublin’s slum-clearance project from the 1930s. Its enduring message was that of the capital city as a rising suburb of identikit residences; it captured the ongoing transformation of virgin sites on the city’s fringes into ‘pleasant new residential areas’. The Old and the New, <italic>Ireland is Building. Hospitals and Houses,</italic> 1950–1951. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315102528/0eb4b6d0-aff5-4cd7-8aeb-4e1bddb43052/content/figI_1_B.jpg"/>
