Dublin’s Fair(?) City

When the coins were revoked, Swift had his victory, about which the Irish parliamentarian Henry Grattan would later remark: “Swift was on the wrong side of England but in Ireland he was a giant.”  

This episode says a good deal about Dublin. The city has always reveled in its great men, even if they tend to repay the compliment by abusing their hometown. (Dean Swift, for example, liked to tell his English friends John Gay and Alexander Pope that he had left England for Dublin because he preferred to be “a freeman among slaves, rather than a slave among freemen.”) Dublin has always been fond of good writing and good talk, though its “notions of liberty” have tended to be fitful. Consequently, its history has always been one of promise unfulfilled. Elizabeth Bowen saw this when she described Dublin as being “full of false starts and dead ends, the store plan of something that never realized itself.” The beautiful buildings of Georgian Dublin might have been built to accommodate the Irish Parliament, but in one stroke, the Act of Union (1800) made most of them superfluous. Here, as in so many other instances, venality trumped “notions of liberty.”  

Many of those buildings—most notably the Customs House and the Four Courts—were commissioned by John Beresford (1738-1805) in his 30-year tenure as head of the Irish revenue. That Beresford, the descendant of a powerful political dynasty rooted in the Londonderry plantation, should have also been instrumental in passing the Act of Union was an irony with an altogether Irish twist. Working behind the scenes with William Pitt to subvert the Irish Parliament, Beresford paved the way for the sectarian divisions that would undo all that the Georgian city had accomplished. 

“Union will leave Dublin but a splendid ruin, the fallen and impoverished and crumbling capital of a province,” David Dickson, the author of this massive new history, quotes one patriot prophesying as early as 1795. And so it proved for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Lawyers, it is true, made a good living in the post-Union city: The Anglo-Irish, after all, were incorrigibly litigious, and doctors never went broke coddling the city’s legion of hypochondriacs. But nearly everyone else was hard up. As for Beresford, although an inspired town planner, he epitomized all that was most treacherous about the Irish Ascendancy, and there was poetic justice in Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association defeating a Beresford for the County Waterford seat in 1826, which led not only to Catholic Emancipation (1829) but to the eventual destruction of the Anglo-Irish ruling class.   

If the Protestant Dublin of Swift and Grattan left little behind but memorials of betrayal, the Roman Catholic Dublin of Fianna Fáil fared no better. Éamon de Valera’s claim that Irish neutrality would somehow reaffirm Irish nationalism rang with comical hollowness. In his brilliant Ireland: 1912-1985 (1989), J. J. Lee asked whether a Nazi invasion, with all its attendant atrocities, could have “disturbed the complacent certainties of hereditary hatreds.” He gave an answer that Swift himself might have enjoyed:  

For his history of the city from medieval times to the end of the 20th century, David Dickson has chosen the subtitle “The Making of a Capital City,” which is an intriguing choice, given that so much of the book chronicles Dublin’s failure to become a capital city. Indeed, now that the city has ceded much of its sovereignty to the European Union in the wake of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, its capital status is more dubious still. Evading the responsibilities of sovereignty has long characterized Dublin. Dickson gives an amusing example of the city’s peculiar insouciance in this line when he notes how its inhabitants spent the day that inaugurated so much misery elsewhere: “When the singing cowboy Gene Autry riding Champion the Wonder Horse came up the steps of the Theatre Royal on 3 September 1939 to launch his latest singing Western, he drew a crowd of many thousands.”  

If Dublin was indifferent to World War II, it was equally indifferent to the outbreak of the Easter Rebellion (1916), when romantic insurrectionists occupied key points of the imperial city, proclaiming, “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” It was only when the rebels had caused a good deal of their city to be burned down that Dubliners began to take notice. And it was only when the British began shooting the rebels that what had hitherto been hostile public opinion swung around in favor of the rebels.  

Dickson’s account of the rebellion is a model of evenhandedness. Certainly, one can agree with the author that when General Sir John Maxwell took command of over 20,000 troops throughout the city, “there was some but not a great deal of abuse of that overwhelming power.” It is true that General Maxwell eventually shot 15 of the rebels, but it is also true that they were guilty of treason, as the British were fighting the same Germans on the Somme that had supplied the rebels with their guns.  

Dickson is similarly just in his coverage of the Dublin lockout of 1913, showing how William Martin Murphy, owner of the city’s extensive tramways, far from being the cardboard villain of Marxist caricature, was one of the fairest employers in the city, a genuine patriot and the principal sponsor of the 1907 Irish International Exhibition. It was the Liverpudlian trade unionist James Larkin who injected class warfare into disputes that could have been amicably resolved without it. 

What is remarkable about Dublin is how little class warfare figured in its history, especially considering its slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. According to the 1926 census, 39,615 families were living in two-room tenements, and the average death rate per 1,000 for children aged 1-5 was 25.6! Yet, as F. S. L. Lyons stressed in his monumental Ireland Since the Famine (1971), Irish workers were never opposed to capitalists per se: “For them .  .  . the most urgent economic task was to create more jobs .  .  . and they were certainly not going to prejudice that possibility by stirring up bad relations with their employers.”  

Still, some were always intent on exacerbating the differences of Dubliners. Convinced that the Irish and Anglo-Irish were locked in a “battle of two civilizations,” the journalist D. P. Moran urged his readers to repudiate what he saw as the degrading influence of the Anglo-Irish. He even deplored the lovely Georgian terraces along Merrion Square: “Their day is done,” he fumed. “The Georgian era is over, and there is little sense in seeking to perpetuate it .  .  . nothing is left for them but demolition.” 

Thanks, in part, to Desmond Guinness, Diana Mosley’s son, and the Irish Georgian Society, Moran’s exhortation did not go entirely heeded. That spared Dublin from what might have been more of the ghastly office blocks that the Dublin Corporation put up in the 1960s, one of which was nicely described by one conservationist as “easily the most monstrous pile of architectural rubbish ever built in Dublin.”  

In his introduction, David Dickson states that his aim in writing this book was “to try to understand the past rather than to recreate it.” Fair enough, although the book would have been better if he had re-created more of what he attempts to elucidate. Dublin’s own inimitable voices, evoking as they do the passion and complexity of this unhappy history, might have been given a more ample hearing. Such omissions notwithstanding, this history of Dublin is an insightful, deeply researched, witty volume, which anyone interested in Ireland, England, Georgian architecture, or the misadventures of nation-building will find fascinating. 

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and His Family.