The allotments provided not alone badly needed food supplies and an education in horticulture but a useful exercise in democracy that broadened people’s sense of solidarity, their social skills and their horizons. This led eventually to the formation of the Irish Plotholders’ Union, which claimed to represent twenty-four associations in Dublin and Kingstown. In an echo of Land League days, their demands included fair rents and fixity of tenure.3
As in Belfast, a typical plot could produce well over £10 worth of food a year. The Irish Times gave the example of a man with a family of eight who kept £2 10s worth of crops to help feed them and sold the balance for £9 11s 6d. Rent and other expenses amounted to £2 5s.4
By October 1916 the Vacant Land Cultivation Society’s plots had generated £2,500 worth of produce, and the demand for plots far exceeded supply. Harrison reported ‘a pathetic eagerness on the part of men, and women too, to secure plots, and a long list of applicants remains yet unsatisfied.’ By then pressure was mounting on the corporation to become more actively involved, and hungry eyes turned on the 1,760 acres of the Phoenix Park, which many citizens wanted turned into one vast allotment. The Chief Secretary, Henry Duke, had no objection in principle, but the Board of Works had other ideas: it took over a section of the park for tillage to meet its own requirements, and pickets placed on the board’s operations failed to sway the government. Instead the corporation agreed to acquire sites to supplement those of the society.5
The big problem for the corporation and the society alike was that no compulsory powers were granted to local authorities (unlike their counterparts in England, Scotland and Wales) to acquire land either directly or for voluntary bodies. As early as February 1916 a meeting was held in the Mansion House to demand the extension of the Small Holdings and Allotments Act (1908) to Ireland. There was no doubting the wide support for such a measure. Father J. McDonnell presided, and on the platform was the Rev. Denham Osborne, Sir Frederick Moore and most of the city’s MPs. Letters of apology were read from the Lord Mayors of Belfast and Limerick and several leading home-rulers, including John Redmond.
The main motion was proposed by Moore and seconded by Tom McPartlin on behalf of the Labour Party and Dublin Trades Council. There was ‘some unrest’ when J. J. Clancy, the Irish Party MP for North County Dublin, said that the extension of British legislation ‘was not only in the interests of workers, but for the general community and even for the British Empire,’ and this turned into outright booing when John Dillon Nugent, secretary of the AOH and MP for Dublin City, rose to make an innocuous speech in support of the campaign. By contrast, the Chief Secretary was cheered when it was announced that he supported the extension of the 1908 act to Ireland.6
There was no doubting the demand for land. In March 1917 the corporation received 1,200 applications for 269 plots.7 As a result additional land was acquired at the Model Farm in Glasnevin, at Clontarf and at Islandbridge, so that by the summer the Vacant Land Cultivation Society was able to accommodate 460 plot-holders and the corporation could accommodate another 2,000. While corporation allotment-holders were at first supposed to grow only potatoes and oats, the latter quickly gave way to cabbages, beetroot, turnips, leeks, parsnips, onions, runner beans, carrots, lettuce and celery. Celery was particularly profitable, as it was in demand as an alleged cure for persons of a nervous disposition.
The movement spread to the southern townships of Rathmines, Pembroke, Blackrock and Kingstown. The main restriction on expansion was the ever-rising rent that landowners demanded in the absence of compulsory purchase legislation. What land was available at reasonable prices was on the north side of the city: 96 of the 113 acres available in early 1917 were there. However, such was the demand that Dubliners did not mind trekking across the city to work their allotments.
In an effort to redress the balance, 37 acres were made available at Islandbridge, but only 10 acres were workable, because of the proximity of the barracks with its adjoining gas house and bomb house for training recruits in trench warfare. The site itself was riddled with trenches, and there were hundreds of army horses ‘all over the place,’ which constantly sampled the produce.8
It was not until the end of 1917 that the government finally introduced the Local Government (Allotments and Land Cultivation) (Ireland) Act, authorising local authorities to acquire land in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. In 1918 Dublin Corporation was able to acquire another 100 acres for cultivation, some of it to compensate for the loss of allotments at Fairbrother’s Fields, where the housing scheme had belatedly begun. By the end of the war the value of produce grown in the city was estimated at between £150,000 and £160,000.
Once the war was over farmers and landlords generally protested at the continued existence of the allotments. As one substantial landowner in Clontarf, Thomas Picton Bradshaw, put it, the Irish Plotholders’ Union was trying to make ‘a temporary war emergency scheme’ a permanent feature of Dublin life, ‘to enable professional men, trade union members and others to oust market gardeners, dairymen, cattle salesmen, schools and sports committees from property on which they had expended money and in which they had an interest.’ However, the Plotholders’ Union was strong enough to see off the challenge until 1926, by which time agricultural prices had fallen by 42 per cent from their wartime maximum.9
Fuel was the other major shortage confronting Dubliners, and unfortunately it could be neither mined nor grown in Ireland. Wages were rising, particularly in unionised trades, such as the crafts and in Dublin Corporation, but prices were rising faster. In January the Mansion House Coal Fund and the Lord Mayor’s Coal Fund were amalgamated to generate greater efficiency and more effective fund-raising. The proposer was the Rev J. Denham Osborne, the Presbyterian minister actively involved in the allotments movement. He lived and worked in the north inner city and was a regular contributor to the proceedings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. He told the society that his pastoral work meant he had recently ‘come into contact with cases where people were living in respectable dwellings who were [hit] harder than even some of the very poor’ by inflation. He estimated that there were four thousand families in the area of the North Dublin Union unable to afford adequate food or fuel.
The fuel shortage also had other implications. The theft of coal was becoming a persistent problem, especially in the North Wall and East Wall areas, where boys climbed on moving railway wagons to throw it down to accomplices.10 The Coal Fund was as much for social control as for charity, and it had support across the political and religious spectrum. It provided good-quality coal at 1s 6d a bag, while the market price was 3s 6d. It sought primarily to assist the working poor, families of workmen earning less than 25s a week.
After a sample survey undertaken later in 1917 the chief sanitary officer for the city, Charles Travers, estimated that there were eight thousand families in the city with an income of less than 25s. While this was half the figure for 1913, the year of the lock-out, he said the rising cost of living made ‘the economic condition of the working class in Dublin disquietingly unsatisfactory.’ He found that the pawning of possessions was on the increase, and that the greatest effect of food poverty was on children. Families lodging in the tenements took it in turns to heat their rooms, cooking food jointly. He found that the traditional cheerfulness of the mothers had given way to concern about procuring adequate food for their families, displacing concern over the sanitary state of their environment.
As we have seen, the consumption of coal fell by 30 per cent in 1917 and a further 25 per cent in 1918. Such large institutions as hospitals, asylums and schools had little choice but to reduce heating levels, public lighting hours were cut drastically and banks agreed to close at 2:30 p.m. each day to reduce energy consumption. However, insurance companies insisted on remaining open until 4:30 p.m. and most retailers until much later. The chairman of the Electricity Supply Committee, Lorcan Sherlock, told the Rotary Club that efforts
to conserve energy and to share the burden equitably were received with ‘indifference from the general public, sneers from the Irish Times, and hardly a word of public support from any section of the press in the city.’11
The mood of the chairman of the other major generator of electricity in the city, Dublin United Tramways Company, was very different when he addressed the annual general meeting on 6 February 1917 in the company’s head office in Upper Sackville Street. Despite being at the vortex of the rising, Murphy’s company had made an even more remarkable recovery than the rebels. Although the company’s power station in Ringsend had been occupied by rebel forces it had not been damaged, only two trams had been burnt and, miraculously, the artillery bombardment had not damaged the tramlines, which could have been catastrophic, as it was almost impossible to obtain replacement track during the war. In contrast, the corporation’s electricity infrastructure had suffered more than £8,000 worth of damage, plunging its operations into the red for the foreseeable future.
While the fighting had cost the DUTC almost £17,000 (made up of £13,898 in damage and £3,000 in lost business during April and May), traffic had increased. At £335,335, receipts were £1,850 higher in 1916 than in 1915, and further growth was expected despite rising fuel costs. The company had paid 24s 5d a ton for coal in 1916, compared with £18s 5d a ton in 1915, an increase of almost a third. Before the war it had cost the company only 9s 8d a ton. Murphy attributed the company’s success to the continuous rise in demand for services, the replacement of some old trams with new cars and the conversion of other vehicles to new and more economical motors. The staff had also played an important role, he said.
Honourable mention is due to our Traffic Manager, Mr. D. Brophy. He remained in charge until the fire reached the opposite side of the lane,12 when in the early hours of Friday morning, the 28th of April, he succeeded in making his way to the Pro-Cathedral, where many people had taken refuge. While there he found the officer in charge of the military operations preparing to bombard the building in the belief that there were rebels sniping from the windows, but Mr. Brophy was able to satisfy him that the report … was entirely devoid of truth. To this incident we owe it that we have a convenient place to meet in today, even though it is rather cramped as our old meeting room at the Imperial Hotel no longer exists.
A dividend of 5 per cent was paid to the shareholders for the second half of 1916, up from 4½ per cent for the first half. The rising had actually hurt the DUTC less than the 1913 Lock-out. Murphy could not resist contrasting the company’s performance as a private transport monopoly with the tribulations of the corporation’s Electricity Supply Committee. Unlike the corporation, the DUTC had absorbed costs rather than passing them on as increases to the customer.13 Naturally Murphy omitted to mention that the cross-subsidisation of business by Dublin’s domestic users benefited the DUTC as a consumer of municipal electricity.
P. T Daly, who had been released from internment just before Christmas 1916, was less resigned about the inability of the corporation to tackle the city’s problems than fellow-councillors such as Lorcan Sherlock. He quickly reinvigorated the Food Committee and spurred on the pursuit of dairymen who were adulterating milk. The more rigorous enforcement of regulations had its desired effect. Only one trader had ever been sent to prison under the Food, Drugs and Margarine Acts, and that had been in 1906. By the end of 1917 there were 200 inspections under the acts, compared with 163 in 1916, and £467 5s 6d had been collected in fines, compared with £244 15s 8d in the previous year. One trader had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and two more had been sentenced to two months each.
Characteristically, Daly insisted on a pay increase for the two inspectors, pointing out that they were paid far less than their counterparts in Britain and £30 to £70 a year less than inspectors of the same grades in Belfast. He did not question the probity of the inspectors, he told the corporation, but decent wages would remove the temptation to take bribes.14
He was pushing an open door. Sir James Cameron had just provided councillors with a summary of a report by the Carnegie Trust on mothers and children that was scathing about Ireland. ‘I am afraid there is a woeful lack of cleanliness, as well as inattention to such details as straining and cooling,’ he said. ‘In a large number of cases the milk delivered is so foul and acrid that it cannot stand without curdling,’ while Dublin milk showed very few samples uncontaminated by the coliforms found in manure. He believed that a lot of this contaminated milk came from the country, where the delay in getting it to the market allowed bacteria to proliferate, especially in warm weather.
Monitoring milk produced in the city was a major operation. There were 205 dairy yards, accommodating five thousand cows, and 459 shops sold milk. Samples could be taken only from a handful of these places on any given day. In rural areas the situation was even worse, with dispensary physicians and relieving officers doubling as medical officers of health and sanitary officers. Infection by dairymen who were typhoid carriers and by cattle that carried tuberculosis was a further concern.15
Milk samples were routinely adulterated with water and the fat content abstracted. A fairly typical case was that of Christopher Dempsey, who ran a milk parlour in Summerhill and had a farm at Betaghstown, Clane, Co. Kildare. He was fined £5 for each of two samples taken from his premises in which the milk was between 70 and 77 per cent water and between 27 and 33 per cent of the fat had been abstracted. While these levels were higher than average, samples with anything up to 25 per cent water and 16 per cent fat deficiency were common, and cases with up to 86 per cent of fat abstracted were uncovered.16
Poor people were particularly dependent on milk, but the problems of the dairy industry affected every family with babies and young children, and it was no wonder that public anger rose rapidly when the cowmen again threatened price increases. In October 1917 a mass meeting was held in Smithfield after the Dairymen’s Association increased the price from 4d to 6d a quart and warned of another increase to 8d before the winter was out. This compared with a price of 3d a quart twelve months earlier.17
The normally moderate Councillor Coghlan Briscoe, executive officer of the Town Tenants’ League, denounced ‘the octopus grip of the profiteer on the food of the people.’ He knew of milk suppliers ‘outside the profiteering ring’ who were willing to sell milk at 4d a quart, and do so profitably. P. T. Daly commended the police magistrates for taking a tougher line on sentencing adulterators. There was unanimous support for a motion proposed by Percy Robinson of the National Union of Clerks that ‘under no circumstances would the workers and the poor of Dublin tolerate the raising of the price of milk.’18
Even the Irish Times declared in exasperation that there were
people in the trade who would not hesitate to bring about a national famine by giving up their business and selling their cattle for export to England. The vice of the Dublin dairymen is not only that they have no sense of public decency but also [that they] produce milk … under a most pernicious and costly system.19
On the same day as the Irish Times editorial the cowkeepers proved that they deserved their reputation by carrying out their threat of raising the price to 8d a quart. The vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, T. W. Russell, promptly used his powers to fix the price at 4d or 5d a quart, depending on quality. To make sure the producers complied he prohibited the export of milk. It would be October 1918 before the price was allowed to rise again and then by only 1d.20
Of course Russell received little credit for his action. The cowkeepers complained, with some justification, that the cost of feed was unacceptably high, because the British army’s demand for fodder had pushed up animal feed prices generally. Their last stand came in a protest at a corporation meeting on 10 December when their spokesman, Councillor Michael Maher, told the meeting that his members would defy the Food Controller and sell their cattle on the city’s streets if need be, because cattle dealers were exporting cows anyw
ay as ‘strippers’ only to rehabilitate them as ‘milchers’ once they reached Holyhead.
There were also claims that ‘cows were being milked just before reaching the boats for the purpose of deceiving the portal inspectors,’ and they should be detained for twelve hours before sailing to ensure they were not lactating. The department rejected the idea out of hand as impractical and admitted that licences were being issued for about a quarter of Irish milch cows to meet demand in Britain and to contain milk prices generally in the United Kingdom.
It was further grist to the advanced nationalist mill. A few councillors even expressed continued sympathy for the cowmen, but the majority remained sceptical. W. T. Cosgrave, once more the leader of the Sinn Féin group after his release from prison, denounced the British government as the main culprit for depriving cowkeepers of cheap feed by virtually shutting down the city’s breweries and distilleries. He demanded that some of the tax on excess profits from Dublin’s war industries, such as the National Shell Factory, be used to subsidise milk and other essential foodstuffs.21
By the time Cosgrave made his intervention in the dairy controversy he was Sinn Féin’s first urban MP, but he was elected for Kilkenny City, not Dublin. He was the fourth Sinn Féin MP in 1917 to defeat a UIL candidate in a by-election.
Redmond and the Irish Party had withdrawn from Parliament on 7 March in an effort to retrieve their political fortunes after Lloyd George confirmed unequivocally that the Government of Ireland Act would exclude Ulster. Redmond accused Lloyd George ‘of treason to the interests of Ireland and the Empire.’ Before leading his party out of the House of Commons he warned, more presciently than he probably realised, that
the Prime Minister is playing into the hands of those in Ireland who are seeking to destroy the Constitutional movement. If that occurs the Premier will have to govern Ireland by the naked sword.
A City in Wartime Page 27