Development and preservation in Dublin: Encyclopedia II - Development and preservation in Dublin - Georgian Dublin

Development and preservation in Dublin - Georgian Dublin

Georgian house on St. Stephen's Green
A surviving Georgian house on St. Stephen's Green, stuck between a victorian building (picture right) and a 1960s office block (left). Over half the Georgian buildings on St. Stephen's Green having been lost since the Georgian era, with many demolished in the 1950s and 1960s . In 1932, Eamon de Valera, senior survivor of 1916 and leader of the defeated anti-treaty forces in the Civil War, won power at the ballot box. With greater finances available, major changes began to take place. A scheme of replacing tenements with decent housing for Dublin's poor began. Plans were proposed for the wholesale demolition of many buildings from the Georgian era, often because they were thought 'old-fashioned' and 'near the end of their life', often because they were seen as symbols of past English and British rule. The Viceregal Lodge was proposed for demolition, to make way for a new residence for the new office of President of Ireland, an office created in Bunreacht na hÉireann, the new Irish constitution which renamed the Irish Free State Éire. Merrion Square, with its large Georgian mansions, was proposed for demolition, to be replaced on its three sides by a national museum, national Roman Catholic cathedral and national art gallery. Though plans were made, few were put into effect and those not implemented were put on hold when in September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Dublin escaped the mass bombing of the war due to Ireland's neutrality, though some bombs were dropped by the German air-force and hit a working-class district.

By 1945, the planned wholesale destruction of Georgian Dublin were abandoned; the Viceregal Lodge (renamed in 1938 Áras an Uachtaráin) was restored as a presidential palace. (The Irish state was also in effect renamed in 1949, becoming the Republic of Ireland). However, from the 1950s onwards, Goergian Dublin came under concerted attack by Irish Government's development policies. While Georgian Dublin survived 1930s plans and World War II, much of it did not survive property developers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The historic but now impoverished Mountjoy Square suffered heavily, with derelict sites replacing historic mansions. When in the 1950s a row of large Georgian houses in Kildare Place near Leinster House was demolished to make way for a brick wall an extreme republican Fianna Fáil minister, Kevin Boland celebrated, saying that they had stood for everything he opposed. He also condemned the leaders of the Irish Georgian Society, established to battle to preserve Georgian buildings and some of whom came from aristocratic backgrounds, as "belted earls". In the 1960s, the world's longest line of Georgian buildings was interrupted when the ESB was allowed to demolish a chunk in the centre and build a modern office block. By the 1980s, road-widening schemes by Dublin Corporation ran through some of the most historic areas of the inner city around Christ Church Cathedral. The nadir of this approach occurred in 1979 when Dublin Corporation destroyed the largest and finest Viking site in the world at Wood Quay, in the face of national opposition, to build its Civic Offices for its civil servants.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Georgian Dublin", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki