Dublin’s North Inner City, Preservationism and Irish Modernity in the 1960s

This article examines changes to Dublin's built environment in the 1960s through a study of the north inner city. It first discusses Dublin Corporation policy in the area and then studies three efforts to resist these changes, by the Irish Georgian Society, Uinseann MacEoin, and the Dublin Housing Action Committee. It argues that, due to the deficit of urban regulation emanating from central government, these groups could use preservation as a way to articulate a variety of discontents. The three campaigns all had very different conceptions of what was worth preserving in the urban environment, resisted Corporation policy in very different ways, and ultimately came into conflict. This urban activism raised issues about the nature of the city in the Irish cultural imagination, the effects of urban modernization, and the role of voluntary bodies in shaping the urban environment. Through addressing these themes this article makes a fundamental contribution to the historiography of the 1960s in Ireland by assessing the complexities of Irish modernity and the continued impact of a multiplicity of pasts on Irish politics and culture.