Of Dublin’s 1 million people, 43% are under the age of 25, and just over 30% were in paid employment in 1986.  This, along with traditional Irish high birth rates, adds up to a high dependency ratio.  However, for a city with historical housing problems related to crowded tenements and landlord dependency, Dublin’s citizens are surprisingly well housed.  Government policy has played a helpful role in attaining this situation.  Though the Dublin Corporation’s early attempts at building housing were limited to the working class and tended to concentrate them in large low-quality low-rise estates near the center of Dublin, the post-war period saw the development of social housing on a grand level, much of it for eventual purchase by tenants.  Today within Dublin, the owner-occupancy rate hovers around 80%, compared to an average 66% in the United States and just 50% in the rest of Europe.  Clearly, Dubliners like the comfort of owning their own place and the government seems to value quality housing and homeownership over other forms of development.   Ireland’s population has grown slowly over the years due to strong emigration patterns, and Dublin’s has grown only slightly faster.
An interesting thing about Dublin’s population is that it is quite homogeneous.  Some 95% of it is Roman Catholic.  There is almost a complete absence of changing ethnic neighborhoods.  It was not always like this in Dublin.  During its colonial days when a powerful Protestant elite controlled the resources, Catholics were more likely to live concentrated in the more crowded, less comfortable inner (and older) parts of the city.  The map below is a representation of the slight pattern of segregation by religion in Dublin around 1911 (Christopher, 1997).  Obviously, the segregation in this colony comes nowhere near approaching the strict racial segregation that existed in Africa.  But unlike in colonies in North America and Australia, the native population in Dublin was not killed off or pushed into marginal lands.  One explanation of this pattern is that the colonizers didn't object to the Irish people so much because they were white.  It also seems that with Dublin so near to the core colonizing country (Britain), order was considered to be more secure, although Ireland became independent from Britain before most other colonies.  But all of this makes Dublin's colonial past hard to put into perspective and makes comparisons difficult between Dublin and Melbourne, Toronto, Bombay, and other cities.

Early in Ireland's independence, the provision of housing was the main goal of planning.  By World War II, the Dublin Corporation had developed nearly 15,000 units, nearly one-third of these for purchase.  The locations of these developments were considered to be suburban at the time; the city's margin was the only place that could accomodate the building that was required to solve the housing problems.  Since then Dublin has expanded far beyond this range, most notably to the three new towns to the south and west, and many old social housing developments such as the Liberties (just to the southwest of Dublin Castle) symbolize the inner-city decay that has troubled Dublin for some time.  The public sector has virtually stopped building housing since the mid 1980s, up until which point it usually had developed about one-third of all the housing on the market annually.  Only in the later periods of building this housing did the Corporation ever design anything good.  While some unattractive highrises lurk to the north in Ballymun, most of it has been in the generic cottage style with almost condescending decor.  The last developments by the Dublin Corporation were more attractive, in architecture and landscape.  Today, even lower-quality low-rise units in the suburbs like the ones pictured below can sell for over $200,000.  An average unit in a flat in central Dublin costs around $500,000.  A huge demand for housing (especially thanks to the white-collar inmigration) has made this market extremely competitive and expensive.  The market should get even tighter as Dublin's extremely young population begins to move out of familial housing in the southwest suburbs.

Click here to continue