THOMAS JOSEPH BYRNE NATION BUILDER by John Byrne and Michael Fewer THOMAS JOSEPH BYRNE NATION BUILDER by John Byrne and Michael Fewer South Dublin Libraries 2013 Copyright © 2013 Michael Fewer, John Byrne and South Dublin Libraries ISBN 978-0-9575115-1-4 Price: €12.99 Design and layout by Noel Smyth @ SilverBark Creative Printed by Graph Print Unit A9, Calmount Business Park Ballymount, Dublin 12 South Dublin Libraries Unit 1 Square Industrial Complex Tallaght Dublin 24 Phone 353 (0)1 462 0073 Contents Acknowledgements 02 Introduction by Mayor Cathal King 03 Abbreviations used 04 Foreword 05 Introduction 11 The Early Years 13 South Dublin Rural District Council, 1901-1919 23 The Local Government Board and the Local Government Department 61 The Office of Public Works 65 Last Years 107 Epilogue 125 Appendices 129 Appendix 1 Map of the South Dublin Rural District Council area 129 Appendix 2 W. T. Cosgrave’s letter to T. J. Byrne regarding Dublin re-housing 130 Sources Consulted 131 Index 133 ■ ■ ■ ■ 01 Acknowledgements The authors wish to express their thanks to those who assisted with information, advice and indeed, encouragement. They include Frederick O’Dwyer , Willie Cumming, Angela Rolfe, Rebecca McKeon and Nirvana Flanagan of the Office of Public Works, Sean Rothery, the staff at the Irish Architectural Archive and the National Archives, Colm McQuinn of Fingal County Council, and especially Kieran Swords and the staff at South Dublin County Council Libraries. 02 ■ ■ ■ ■ Introduction by Mayor Cathal King Thomas Joseph Byrne was a quiet, retiring man who never sought to promote himself. It is likely that his association with the wide range of important work undertaken and promoted by him could easily fade with time and be forgotten. Thankfully this book ensures that the story of this great man will be remembered. We are deeply indebted to the authors, Michael Fewer and John Byrne, for this informative and extensively illustrated book which tells about this great man and his work. T. J. Byrne was truly a nation builder in every sense of the term. Through enthusiasm, sheer hard work, and making use of his formidable talents as an architect, engineer, project planner, leader and man of culture, he sought not just to provide structures and infrastructure but to ensure that the higher aims of supporting the growth and development of communities and society were the bedrock of his projects. It is fitting that South Dublin County Council should be associated with this book as a predecessor local authority, South Dublin Rural District Council, is particularly associated with Thomas Joseph Byrne’s early career. We are also very grateful to John Byrne and to Michael Fewer who have generously donated much material to South Dublin Libraries for inclusion in Source, the library service’s digital archive. Their generosity has resulted in the fine T. J. Byrne Collection and additions to other collections which are available to everyone courtesy of South Dublin Libraries. Source can be accessed at www.source.southdublinlibraries.ie. Go raibh míle maith agaibh. Tá súil agam go mbaineann sibh taitneamh as an leabhar breá seo agus dá bharr go mbeidh léirthuiscint agaibh ar thábhacht T. J. Byrne i saol na hÉireann. Cathal King Mayor of South Dublin County ■ ■ ■ ■ 03 Thomas Joseph Byrne Nation Builder Abbreviations Used LCC London County Council OPW Office of Public Works SDRDC South Dublin Rural District Council LGB Local Government Board (British Government) LGD Local Government Department (Free State Government) RIBA Royal Institute of British Architects RIAI Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland AAI Architectural Association of Ireland ACAI Academy of Christian Art of Ireland 04 ■ ■ ■ ■ Foreword This well-considered monograph builds on an exhibition mounted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Whitechurch Library, Ballyboden in 2011. The Library was thronged that day and the hanging of a large quilt, handmade communally to a bespoke design for the building’s birthday, was very moving. The idea of a public building remaining so well loved and central to community life for 100 years (even a building this skilful in its enjoyment of light, space and comfort) is heartening. Under its high white, wooden ceiling, the Library now counts a lively web-project among its attractions, which looks to its future as confidently as to its past. In Murray Fraser’s intriguing book ‘John Bull’s Other Homes’, Byrne’s work is placed in a more radical context. Fraser suggests that from the Land Wars of 1883 onwards to Independence, pressure grew on the British Government to intervene in Irish housing as a quid pro quo to avoid further violent conflict. A model of subsidised state housing, developed as the Labourers’ Cottages programme, was introduced and tested in Ireland as a palliative social measure. Fear of demobilising soldiers at the end of the Great War extended this initiative into Britain’s first fully-subsidised state housing – the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign – under the Addison Act of 1919. This theory links Byrne’s accomplished use of Arts and Crafts architecture in his many Labourers’ Cottages schemes to the radical Utopian socialism of William Morris and its urban expression in London County Council’s (LCC) first social housing projects at Boundary Street (1895) and Millbank (1899). Byrne’s period in the LCC working on men’s hostels exposed him to these progressive projects where a new architectural language replaced the grudgingly authoritarian attitude to housing of the poor embodied in the grim ■ ■ ■ ■ 05 Thomas Joseph Byrne Nation Builder T. J. Byrne c 1923 Foreword tenements of earlier philanthropic projects. The location of Byrne’s home and much of his work in Ballyboden (site of the Pearse Brothers’ school, St. Enda’s, and which constituted a small Gaelic Revival enclave including, at times, the homes of J.M. Synge and W.B. Yeats) and his friendship with W.T. Cosgrave, then a Sinn Féin politician, reinforce Fraser’s narrative of architecture linked to radical politics. Whatever the sources, Byrne’s South Dublin work was rooted in a concern for social improvement. Each housing project in this period strives to establish a communal order and legibility through strong, clear layouts, responsive to the inherent qualities of its site, including the building materials chosen. Refining and developing house plans as the programme of cottages rolls out, he wins added space and dignity for these families setting a design benchmark for social housing of the time. Handsome proportions, trademark lunette windows and local materials add life and character to his elevations, likeable to this day. His libraries at Whitechurch and Clondalkin combine lively formal massing with comfortable usable interiors – a cosy fire in each reading room, for instance. It could be suggested that the quality of his cottage schemes fed into the pungent debate which dogged social housing in Dublin from the introduction by Lord and Lady Aberdeen of the Garden City philosophy in the person of Patrick Geddes in 1911. Dublin Corporation had until then pursued a committment to slum clearance and rebuilding at medium density in the city centre itself, maintaining communities and keeping the poor near possible sources of casual employment. An unlikely alliance of progressive Unionists, Larkinites and intellectuals including Byrne, countered with what was then seen as a more enlightened approach – the Garden City model of new cottage schemes in less costly suburban locations and at lower density. Byrne’s housing at Mount Brown, a high quality cottage scheme at suburban density but in a city centre location, illustrates the tensions in the government approach adopted until 1930. ■ ■ ■ ■ 07 Thomas Joseph Byrne Nation Builder This debate became most shrill with the launch of de Valera’s inner-city apartment- based programme in Amsterdam-style under the direction of the heroic H.G. Simms in 1931. Like Byrne, Simms was born in England. Both were cultured, well-travelled for their day and committed to social improvement. Both were architects gifted with design skill, organisational genius and a super-human capacity for work – eventually leading to ill-health and an early death for both (Simms at his own hand). In their prolific output, generosity and untimely death, the careers of these two worthwhile men somehow parallel each other but there is no record of any connection. Far lower site and construction costs and faster house production inevitably allowed the suburban cottages to numerically outstrip the inner-city flats. Output was now driven by political quotas and the suburban programme had the approval of the Catholic Church, which declared that the ‘cottage and its cabbage patch’ would ‘obviate the moral dangers of the shared staircase’! The debate was settled and the pattern established before World War 2, and to this day, Dublin continues to address real growth through its uncontrolled suburbs with problematic and unsustainable results. Likeable and interesting as Byrne’s early work in South Dublin is, it might be argued that his greatest contribution to Dublin was his renewal of the Custom House and, most significantly, the Four Courts after Independence. That these buildings continue to be the defining elements of the city’s streetscape, roofscape and silhouette, and remain in viable civic use can be fully attributed to Byrne. Without his steely resolve (guaranteed by his engineering/constructional capacity and innovation), and his insistence that it was not just possible, but essential, to restore these monuments, Dublin would not enjoy the presence and grace of these beautiful structures. An impressive figure in so many ways, Byrne continued to contribute not just in his role as State Architect from the 1920s onwards but through his involvement with the Architects Association of Ireland, Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and his teaching at the newly-formed School of Architecture at UCD.