Come Here To Me!

At night we lie in filthy beds
Scratching our aching lousy heads.
Broken by the thought of rent
For a room in a stinking tenement.

-excerpt from ‘The Workless’ in Republican Congress, 30 June 1934.

Iconic image of Republican Congress delegation partaking in commemoration. “Shankill Road Belfast Branch: Break The Connection With Capitalism.”

The Republican Congress occupies an important, though disputed, place in Irish left-wing memory. In existence from 1934 until 1936, the organisation emerged from a split within the ranks of the IRA, proclaiming boldly at its inception that “we believe that a Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots capitalism on its way.”

Torn apart by internal ideological disagreement from the beginning, there is a certain romanticism attached to the Congress owing to its ability to organise some Belfast Protestant workers into its ranks and the fact some of its leading lights were killed on the battlefields of Spain (the Spanish Civil War remaining one of the few occasions in human history where history has very much been written by the defeated protagonists). Yet while much has been written on the anti-fascist activities of the Congress and its contribution to the ranks of the International Brigades, other aspects of its political activities are often overlooked. If Congress enjoyed success on any frontier, it was certainly in its abilities to organise in both Dublin slumdom and emerging suburbia with the emergence of Tenants Leagues, winning a number of victories over landlords and an embarrassed Dublin Corporation. Many of its tactics, from rent boycotts to the occupation of houses, would be adopted by later generations of housing activists.

A changing tenement landscape

The tenement landscape of 1930s Dublin is something we have previously examined on the website. In an irony of history, many of the tenements occupied what was once the splendor of a Georgian city. As Jim Larkin Jr. would recount, Dublin stood upon the Liffey as “a city of fine Georgian houses which had been slowly rotting away for a hundred years and which had become an ever growing cancer of horrible, inhuman, dirty, vermin infest tenements, unequaled by any modern city in Europe.”

The period witnessed some significant advances in public housing in the capital, thanks in no small part to the approach taken by Housing Architect Herbert George Simms, responsible for the construction of some 17,000 new dwellings in his time in office. New flat dwellings were constructed in the city, while suburban development pushed ahead. Taking Cabra as an example of growth, the population there increased from 5,326 in 1926 to 19,119 in 1936. Cabra on the northside and Crumlin/Drimnagh on the southside represented the most ambitious suburban developments of the still relatively new Free State. Fianna Fáil had made housing an election issue in 1932, referring to the out-going first government of the state as a “rich mans government” who had failed to provide for the working classes of Ireland’s urban centres.

Still, images like this one recently posted on the blog show how there was still much work to do. Right alongside the new developments of Simms and Dublin Corporation, tenements like those shown there in Mary’s Lane remained a reality for many. Conditions were poor in early Dublin Corporation inner-city housing schemes like Corporation Buildings, but they were worse still for those at the mercy of private landlords.

‘We, The People Of York Street’

From the very beginning of the Congress, its newspaper, Republican Congress, focused its attention on conditions in tenement Dublin. An edition of the paper in June 1934 reported on the refusal of residents of York Street to pay rents until conditions improved:

The slum dwellers of York Street have been the first section of the working-class to petition the people of Ireland to right the insufferable, shocking,inhuman conditions under which they live. Here is an appeal to the conscience of the Irish working-class that should strike a deep, momentous note of response. Terrible indignation should burn up in the breast of every worker at a system that condemns our brothers and sister to crawl to an unholy death in such cesspools of misery and abomination. Dublin landlords stand forth in this area as the most soulless, greedy, despicable exploiters of their class.

The paper called for the refusal of rents to be extended into other areas where housing was inadequate, insisting that “York Street is the first; where is the next? Extend the area! Broaden the struggle! Compel the Corporation to house the workers, whether they are able to pay or not. Houses first; talk of rent afterwards….Already it is done in English cities controlled by Labour Corporations.”

The paper encouraged tenement dwellers to “appear in your hundreds at the next Corporation meeting! Demand immediate action to clear these areas and transfer the tenants to Corporation houses and flats.” At the time, Alfie Byrne was Dublin’s Lord Mayor. Byrne had long enjoyed a strained relationship with the labour movement, stretching back to the days of Larkinism. The tenants marched onto the Mansion House, making their demands for “the  stopping of eviction proceedings now pending, and immediate steps by the Corporation to house the workers of the areas in suitable surroundings.” Byrne was in unfamiliar territory, the ever-popular politician now in a hostile crowd. While he met with a delegation from the York Street tenements, he emerged to an unfamiliar audience:

When the deputation appeared with Byrne on the Mansion House steps, the crowd refused to hear Alfie Byrne and shouted for Congress speakers. In response, Charlie Donnelly said that when the Congress led the tenants of Magee’s Court, York Street and Gloucester Place to the Mansion House did not give them the undertaking that the Lord Mayor would have any solution to their problem. The Congress had told them that the Corporation was a landlord Corporation, that it served the interests, not of the tenants, but of the landlords (cheers)

The landlords’ Corporation could not solve the workers’ housing problem because under the present system, houses were not built for workers’ use but for landlords’ profit (cheers).

Charles Donnelly, a young Congress activist centrally involved in the Tenants Leagues.

George Gilmore, one of those who had gone into the Republican Congress from the IRA, later lamented this event, as “they marched on the Mansion House and presented their petitions to the Lord Mayor – and that was one of our mistakes. They ought to have marched on the Trades Union Council.” Certainly, the desire to pull the union movement into the Tenants League was central to how some Congress activists envisioned the movement playing out. There could be no doubting the organisational commitment of what were primarily young activists from the Congress though. In addition to Gilmore and Donnelly, there was Cora Hughes. Goddaughter of Taoiseach De Valera, Hughes contracted TB, which ran rife through the tenements of inner-city Dublin, many close to her maintaining her work in Tenants League activism exposed her to the deadly killer. De Valera later carried the coffin at her funeral. Like Donnelly, she had been active in left-wing politics in UCD,  as a member of ‘Student Vanguard’, an anti-fascist organisation which proclaimed fascism to be “the bludgeon of the reactionary elements against the struggle for the national and social liberation of the Irish people.”

From York Street, agitation spread into neighbouring streets and courts. Just as the residents of York Street had done, people living in Magee’s Court also penned an account of their living conditions for Republican Congress:

In Magee’s Court there are 7 small cottages (42 rooms) enclosed in a Court 10 feet wide. In these cottages live 36 families—156 people. The air is practically unbearable. The rooms at night are walking with sewerage beetles. Mothers have to remain up until day-light walking to and fro from bed to bed to protect their children from these loathsome insects. And then many of these mothers have to be out to their daily work the following morning! The walls are crumbling and damp; the roofs leaking; the floors slanting in the upstairs rooms because the front walls of the houses are leaning so much forward. The floor of one of the rooms is in such a perilous condition that the landlord advised the tenants not to use it—but owing to the congestion he did let it—and is taking rent for it!

These condemnations of tenement Dublin were powerful because they came from within tenement Dublin. Like wildfire, it spread across inner-city Dublin, with Republican Congress giving over pages to first hand testimonies of conditions in tenement Dublin. In some cases, these were the reports of Congress activists:

Climbing a rickety stairs I entered a small room over a vegetable store, or more properly speaking, a stable in the vicinity of Parnell Square. There was no fire (in April). There was one bed on which lay a married girl of 19, who was expecting a baby. The bedclothes were old coats. The husband, who was unemployed, was receiving 9 shillings a week outdoor assistance, of this sum six shillings went on rent, leaving three shillings for food and other necessities. On the day of my visit they had been living on rice for two days, but this was now exhausted.

Others were writing about the misery of tenement Dublin too; when the Irish Press launched its campaign against Dublin slumdom two years later, it laid the blame for horrific housing conditions on British imperialism, maintaining that the slums were a “tragic British legacy.” To the Irish Press, British policy in Ireland “left to the Free State its inheritance of slumdom”. It was not an argument the Congress bought. Unsurprisingly, state intelligence took a keen interest  in the Tenants Leagues agitation from the beginning, believing it to represent a significant threat.

Tactics: Occupy and Withhold

A centrally important tactic for the Tenants Leagues from the beginning was the occupation of houses at risk of eviction. In June 1934, the Congress newspaper reported on the case of J.O’Kane, a man living in a Corporation house in Inchicore, who unable to pay his rent due to unemployment had applied to be moved to a cheaper home. The transfer was not forthcoming, and when O’Kane was threatened with occupation,members of Congress occupied O’Kane’s home: “The eviction must not take place until alternative accommodation is provided. All Dublin workers and all Dublin tenants will rally to the support of this unfortunate Dublin family, who are being victimised by the  Alfie Byrne Corporation.” The tactic of occupying homes spread to Belfast and Waterford, where there were active branches of the Tenants Leagues.

Occupations and resistance to evictions led to legal problems. The newspaper reported on 22 September 1934 on a court case brought about as a result of opposition to the eviction of the Kennedy family from their home on South Brown Street:

Seven prisoners were brought from the cells. They had been on remand in custody since their arrest on the7th inst. They were: Timothy and Mary Anne Kennedy (tenants), and Congress workers; Eamonn O Faolain, (Irish Unemployed Workers’ Executive); George Kavanagh, Hugh Doyle, Patrick Murphy and Patrick Monks. They were charged with conspiracy in connection with the reinstatement of the Kennedys in the room from which they had been evicted.

All were fined on that occasion, but the holding of the activists in custody led to significant protests in inner-city Dublin. A spokesman for the Corporation “professed concern for the possible fate of the accused when they went back to a condemned house.”

The withholding of rent by the poor was a powerful tactic, but as Republican Congress activist Patrick Byrne recalled, it also brought risks. For families who lived on the breadline, it was a rare occurrence to have money at the end of the month:

The rent strikes were most alarming. We told the tenants to without the rent, but not to spend it, a difficult injunction for people on the borderline of starvation to comply with. We held street meetings in alleyways and courts, using borrowed chairs for a platform, and arranged to fight off any eviction fight.

At Magee’s Court, it was claimed that 20 of the 38 tenant families were partaking in the rent boycott. In seeking a solution to the crisis, the Tenants Leagues called for the adoption of systems in place in Labour controlled districts in England:

Rent in accordance with income is one of the demands of the Tenant Leagues of Dublin. It is not an impossible demand, nor is it a case where imagination has gone astray and asks for what could only be achieved in a dream. It is something
which is in existence already. There are local authorities which today are fixing the rent of houses not according to the type of house, nor according to what they are pleased to call the economic rent, but according to the tenant’s ability to pay.

Tactics were militant, but for Congress it was important to show radicalism. As historian Adrian Grant has noted, many in Congress felt the need to prove the organisations militancy, as “the IRA tried to discredit the new group, claiming that they were just another Fianna Fáil and would jump into constitutional politics at the first chance.”  Brian Hanley has detailed the broad activity of Congress activists in an article on the short-lived organisation, noting that Free State authorities did see Congress as a threat, with an internal Garda report noting that “It is thought that the orthodox IRA will never be a serious menace to the Government as at present constituted. It is thought that the Republican Congress Group, under Peadar O’Donnell, which endeavours to get control of the Labour organisations in the country for the purpose of creating general social disorder and internal chaos will be a much greater menace.”

Republican Congress, 21 July 1934.

Decline of Congress and the Tenants Leagues

Through the tenant organisation masses of people can be reached who cannot be reached in any other way. And a mass tenant movement under voluntary leadership, will become, through both direct educational work and the indirect education of its activities, a recruiting ground for the other working class organisations : Trade Union, Unemployed, Anti-Fascist, Republican.

-Charlie Donnelly, writing in Republican Congress 22 December 1935.

Throughout 1934 and into 1935, the Tenants Leagues won a number of significant victories. Patrick Byrne recalled that “On one occasion the Third Dublin District Committee carried on a rent strike for two months affecting five streets in the vicinity of Westland Row, and finally won a 25% reduction in rent. At the same time the Fourth District Committee won rehousing by the Dublin Corporation for the tenants of Magee’s Court, a collection of filthy cottages fit only for the vermin abounding therein.”

As 1935 progressed however, the Republican Congress was severely weakened. Internal political debates over the nature of what the organisation should be were one crucial aspect of that weakening, but so too was an increasingly hostile political atmosphere, and the reemergence of a rabid anti-communism, encouraged by the Catholic clergy and sections of the press. Peadar O’Donnell would later lament, quite rightly, that “it wasn’t the tycoons of Dublin who tried to lynch me in College Green during a Red Scare but poor folk who had been driven out of their minds by a month’s rabid Lenten Lectures.” To the Irish Independent, communism was “anti-religious and anti-God,the enemy of nationalism and democracy, and subversive of morality and public order.” The Republican Congress, the Communist Party of Ireland and even campaigns like the Tenants Leagues were tarred one and the same.

Many activists either stepped aside from activism or left Ireland demoralised, others soldiered on through days of street violence and opposition. Perhaps young Charlie Donnelly best encapsulates the frustrations of that time; his friend Leslie Daiken, living in London, remembered that Donnelly arrived at his door one morning in 1936. He was “straight from the Euston train, and before the milk…thinner, paler, more set at the cold eyes” and told him “I just had to get out of that bloody place.”