Derelict Dublin

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"These bricks were returning once more to dust, one by one these walls would bulge outwards, crack, collapse into rubble. They were despised and uncared for, like the tenants they sheltered, who lived for the most part on bread and tea and bore children on rickety beds to grow up in the same hardship and hunger". James Plunkett, Strumpet City (1969)

" I condemn the whole of the tenement system now existing. It breeds misery; and worse. It causes a great waste of human life and human force; men, women and children can never rise to the best that is in them under such conditions". John Cooke, Report into Housing Conditions (1914)

Introduction

This series of photographs is taken from the report of the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire into the housing conditions of the working classes of Dublin. The pictures give great insight into the miserable life in the overcrowded and poverty-stricken tenements and courts of Dublin in 1913.

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