Ballymun flats were a pinnacle of design
‘Architecturally fabulous’ towers ahead of their time, says Hugh
TV ARCHITECT Hugh Wallace says the now-demolished Ballymun flats were ‘architecturally fabulous’ when they first emerged in the Dublin skyline.
Few of the former residents of the sprawling tower blocks – which once housed 17,000 people – shed tears for their demise as part of the regeneration of the north Dublin city suburb.
The seven-tower complex in Ballymun, each named after a 1916 Rising leader – Pearse, MacDonagh, Clarke, Connolly, Ceannt, Plunkett and McDermott – was an attempt to relocate people from the capital’s inner-city to more modern highrise accommodation on what was then the outskirts of the city.
The brutalist style of the buildings was a paean to modernism, but the concrete structure later became degraded and the towers suffered from a lack of maintenance and local community facilities.
The last tower block in Ballymun was demolished in 2015. But the Home Of The Year judge said the high-rise flats were beautifully designed when they were first built in the 1960s.
‘The funny thing about the Ballymun flats is architecturally they were actually fabulous,’ Mr Wallace tells a new documentary about Ireland’s changing housing landscape.
But he added: ‘Where they fell down was on the lifts which there was no maintenance, so they didn’t work.’
Despite the perks of underfloor heating and cable television, the documentary reveals how the absence of amenities and maintenance were cited among the biggest failings of the seven towers.
In the well-timed programme on Ireland’s housing revolution over the past 100 years, the awardwinning architect gives his verdict on everything from the ‘bungalow blitz’ revolution to the nation’s penchant for carpeted, avocado bathrooms and dark conservatories.
In the latest episode of The Way We Were, Mr Wallace says Irish homes were ‘torture chambers’ for women before the advent of electricity due to the back-breaking workload of household chores.
The programme reveals only 10% of people owned their homes when the Free State government took power in 1922, the remainder of the population rented their residences.
By 1946, only 23% of Irish people had an indoor toilet and just 15% had a bath with running water and 400,000 houses had no electricity.
‘There were no throw-away nappies, so the house was like nappyville,’ said Mr Wallace. ‘The women of Ireland got a fairly bum deal, to be totally honest, by the whole thing.
‘The home wasn’t their sanctuary, it was probably actually a torture chamber.’
The Government’s first corporation housing scheme was built in Marino on Dublin’s northside in 1924, just a few years into its administration.
Mr Wallace says of the housebuilding drive: ‘They’re amazing when you think of the effort that went in to build thousands and thousands of houses. There was no money, but we built houses.’ A social housing boom followed between 1932 and 1942 in which 29,000 urban homes and 20,000 rural cottages were built all across the country.
By the 1970s, Ireland was enjoying a self-build bonanza, thanks to a book of DIY building plans, Bungalow Bliss, produced by architect Jack Fitzsimons.
Mr Wallace said: ‘The cousin had put up the blocks, the cousin would do the plasterwork and off you went. There were 400,000 bungalows built from the 1970s to 2000, which is an astounding amount of housing.’
The architect also looks back on the housing crisis in Ireland in the 1960s as industrial developments brought immigrants back home to take up jobs.
‘In the 1960s people who lived in the city centre were living in tenements, of which 283 tenements got condemned for being uninhabitable.’
The programme shows footage of riots in 1969 as anger at the lack of housing supply and soaring rents boiled over, echoing public frustration
‘The women of Ireland got a fairly bum deal’
‘There was no money, but we built houses’
at the chronic lack of available housing today.
The programme reveals that surrender grants and right-to-buy schemes meant only one-third of local authority housing stock remained in the hands of the State by the 1990s as they were offered to council tenants for much less than their market value.
RTÉ presenter Joe Duffy remembers his mother’s joy at being able to purchase her home.
‘Eventually, after 60 years in her house in Ballyfermot, she was able to buy the house on her own without help from anyone. She had the deeds in her handbag and brought them everywhere. It was the first thing she ever owned.’
Addressing the current crisis, Mr Wallace says he doesn’t believe the current coalition has the same ability and vision for housing shown by the nation’s first governments.
‘It was a vision to deliver over 20 or 30 years a housing strategy and policy that was the foundation of society,’ he said.