Frank McDonald (1)

This book appeared at a time when the Irish economy had juddered to a complete halt leaving the country with the second highest number of unemployed in the OECD. In Dublin, the loss and lack of jobs was compounded by a heroin epidemic. Against this background the Irish Times journalist Frank McDonald investigated the planning decisions of the previous two decades that had seen large portions of the city’s architectural heritage reduced to brick dust. The last building boom Ireland had experienced had been during the mid eighteenth century when Dublin rivaled London in terms of economic activity. The decline of the city’s status followed on from the Act of Union 1801 that saw the dissolution of the Irish parliament and political union with Great Britain. Many of the grand town houses of the Irish protestant establishment were slowly abandoned and inhabited by the city’s poor. By the twentieth century much of this architectural heritage had become synonymous with poverty and deprivation. During the 1960s as an independent Ireland sought to express its confidence and independence through architectural modernity, Dublin’s architectural past suffered greatly. For the next twenty years huge sections of the city were obliterated in what appeared to be a disregard for city planning and heritage verging on the pathological.
McDonald details the perpetrators and victims of this unfettered approach to city planning with a dogged reporter's style. The book remains an important social document for a number of reasons. Although the litany of destruction and development has now been succeeded by a more recent phase of huge change, many of those mentioned still play an active role in the commercial and political life of Ireland. The reader is left with little doubt of the longstanding relationships that were formed and still exist between Fianna Fáil and the country's builders and developers.… (more)