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As I watched the incredible spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris this summer, a city that has been at the forefront of traffic reduction, I wondered whether we in Ireland would have the courage and the sense of pride in our capital city to put it on display to the world like that.
Considering cities like Paris’ transformative ambition for traffic reduction, the initial stages of the Dublin City Transport Plan have experienced disproportionate media coverage relative to their gentle impact on the everyday lives of citizens. While I acknowledge that this article contributes to that volume of coverage, I think it is worth looking at the issue with a wider lens.
In his recent book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald comes to the realisation that the consistent objective of town and city planning in the twentieth century, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin was “not really an attempt to transform urban space. Rather, it was an attempt to do away with the lively, messy, unpredictable city altogether” [1]. The title of Fitzgerald’s book comes from Le Corbusier’s 1929 work Urbanisme, which was feted on its publication as a solution to the “problem of the city” [2].
This idea of cities as problems to be solved may explain some of the attitudes towards progress in our own capital city. In his seminal book on transport in Dublin, James Wickham reports that one of the reasons that people use cars in cities is to protect themselves from threats of violence, real or perceived, coming from outside the car [3]. In this context there is an obvious attraction to being able to drive from your safe, leafy suburb into a city-centre multi-storey car park, from where you can directly access the shops you wish to visit. You can be in the city without ever having to engage with the city.
And perhaps there is good reason to view Dublin as a dangerous place, best avoided. The riots in Dublin city late last year and attacks on tourists have fed a narrative that the city centre is in decline and that people don’t want to go there. This narrative is not borne out by the reality.
People still want to visit Dublin city and to spend their money there. Dublin City Council’s most recent Canal Cordon Count, from 2022, records that close to 180,000 people enter the city centre each day at the morning peak period. Of those entering the city only 28% do so by private car [4]. The latest report from the Dublin Economic Monitor records a continuing upward trajectory in retail spending going back to 2018. Even the impact of the Covid lockdown, which saw a dip in retail spending for quarter two of 2020, saw a return to the upward trajectory by quarter four of the same year. The biggest increases in spending have been in overseas visitors and in the entertainment sector [5].
Therefore, the predicted negative impacts of the reduction in private cars in the city centre appear to be at best, exaggerated, while the benefits have perhaps been undersold. Recent supportive commentary on the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan has focussed on the need to reduce congestion and improve reliability of the bus network, the benefits of which are self-evident. Separately, the recent publication of a Noise Action Plan for Dublin has identified the Transport Plan as an important measure to “provide significant indirect noise reduction benefits” for the city centre [6]. The memory of the idyllic, quieter urban environment that prevailed during Covid lockdown still lingers, but we now know that reducing noise pollution is as much a public health issue as it is an aesthetic consideration [7].
Amid the recent debates about the alarming increase in road deaths there has been little discussion about the direct relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. Reducing car traffic will make our cities safer for all, including car drivers.
But perhaps the least discussed and the most important benefit that can accrue from a reduction in cars is the impact it has on social cohesion and community wellbeing. It is over fifty years since Don Appleyard first drew the connection between how heavily trafficked a street is and how well people know their neighbours [8]. He found that the isolation caused by heavy traffic was particularly acute for children and older people. This lack of a sense of community on heavily trafficked streets, he found, was tolerated by those who treated the street as a transient residence. Those who found it intolerable, especially families with children, moved elsewhere if they could. Those who were too poor to move, or too old, were left living in conditions they found intolerable. This is evidently not a good recipe for a strong and resilient urban community [9].
A recent study found that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe [10]. Ireland also has the second highest level of car-dependency in Europe [11]. This is no coincidence – the correlation between car-dependency and social isolation is well documented.
Two and half weeks after the Olympic games first put Paris on display, we saw 20,000 people gather on the magnificent urban stage that is O’Connell Street in Dublin, to welcome home our Olympian heroes. Seeing this spectacle of young and old celebrating on the street gives me hope. perhaps we can learn to love the “lively, messy, unpredictable city” that is our capital, and that we can have the courage to make the decisions that will deliver a healthier, more attractive, and more liveable city.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
1. D. Fitzgerald, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow, London, Faber & Faber, 2024.
2. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1972.
3. J. Wickham, Gridlock - Dublin's transport crisis and the future of the city, Dublin, tasc / New Island Press, 2006.
4. National Transport Authority, Canal Cordon Report 2022, [document from website], 2022, https://www.nationaltransport.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NTA-Canal-Cordon-Report-2022-Final.pdf , (accessed 30/08/2024).
5. Dublin Economic Monitor, Dublin Retail Spending Growth Maintained in Early Summer 2024, [webpage], 2024, https://www.dublineconomy.ie/insights/dublin-retail-spending-growth-maintained-summer-2024-18214/, (accessed 30/08/2024).
6. Action Planning Authority Working Group supported by Noise Consultants Limited, Dublin Agglomeration Noise Action Plan 2024-2028, [document from website], 2024, https://www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/2024-08/13354a-20-r014-04-f08-dublin-agglomeration-noise-action-plan_compressed.pdf, (accessed 30/08/2024).
7. Environmental Protection Agency, Noise and your health, [webpage], 2024, https://www.epa.ie/environment-and-you/noise/noise-and-your-health/, (accessed 30/08/2024).
8. D. Appleyard and M. Lintell, Environmental Quality of City Streets: The Residents' Viewpoint, [document from website], 1971, https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/hrr/1971/356/356-008.pdf, (accessed 30/08/2024).
9. More recently, the Welsh Minister for Transport, Lee Waters, who introduced a 20mph default speed limit in urban areas, described a similar phenomenon: "Lowering the speed reduces the number of deaths, reduces the number of casualties but also, critically changes the feel of a neighbourhood and allows more social interaction. So, when there is less noise and less sense of danger, people are more likely to go out and about. They are likely to talk to their neighbours, they are likely to allow their children play in their street. Their community feels different, and that then encourages and enables a different type of behaviour".
Carspiracy - You'll Never See The World The Same Way Again, [online video], 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c, (accessed 30/08/2024).
10. S. Mulgrew, 'Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe, new study finds', Irish Independent, [webpage], 2023, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/ireland-has-the-highest-levels-of-loneliness-in-europe-new-study-finds/a1717927937.html, (accessed 30/08/2024).
11. S. McCarthaigh, 'Irish have second-highest car dependency in the EU', Irish Examiner, [webpage], 2022, https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40984532.html, (accessed 30/08/2024).
Of the many predicaments facing humanity today, arguably the most difficult to make sense of is the housing crisis [1]. Certainly, natural disasters, pandemics and wars destroy homes, disrupt supply chains and labour markets, and drive mass migrations. Population growth increases demand. But housing crises are not in the first instance created by these events. On the contrary, I argue, they are a matter of design [2].
In economic terms, housing is often framed as a simple problem of supply: If we just built enough homes, there would be no crisis [3]. This argument will be very familiar to anyone attuned to the current debate around housing in Ireland. Under a market-led paradigm, however, the construction industry can never build enough homes to meet demand because, if it did, their product would lose its sale value and they'd go out of business [4]. So really our problem is one of distribution, not supply, and its resolution therefore is a question of will, not fate [5].
In making sense of social and political problems, appeals to the laws of nature can be compelling – after all, they have a ring of truth about them: we don't control the weather; we never know when we'll be struck down by illness, injury, or death; violence and our vulnerability to it are unfortunate but inevitable by-products of our hapless existence as human animals [6]. This is a routine intellectual trick performed by liberal economists when they discuss the principle of the free market as though it were something akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. The argument goes something like this: in the existential competition for scarce resources, there must be winners and losers ('survival of the richest,' if you will) and any attempt to artificially level the playing field is an unwarranted interference with Nature. The inevitability implied by this argument is exemplified in the notion of 'the invisible hand', Adam Smith's classic conceptualisation of market forces, describing how individuals acting in self-interest might unintentionally produce effects that benefit society as a whole [7]. Providing an apparent justification for the unfettered pursuit of profit, the invisible hand was famously adopted by proponents of laissez-faire economics [8]. However, these later theorists took the phrase out of context: the so-called 'grandfather of modern economics', Smith was in fact expressing his concern about the social, political and moral distortions produced by unregulated commerce [9]. The invisible hand may be rational, but it doesn't have a conscience.
A considerable body of research has examined the causes and effects of Ireland's emblematic post-2008 housing crisis. Much of this work focuses on how global processes of real-estate financialisation and the neoliberalisation of urban governance have intersected with the local dynamics of a parochial democracy suffering from a post-colonial property complex [10]. This research illustrates that, rather than expressing some uniquely deep connection to the land of our forebears, the emphasis on homeownership in Irish housing policy simply reflects the status of private property as the primary financial asset in a system of wealth accumulation upon which our economy depends [11]. This is reflected in a suite of government schemes that attempt to guarantee continuous growth in property values along with ever-wider proprietorship.
Deregulation, tax breaks, and development subsidies like the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme seek to reduce supply-side costs and minimise risk in order to encourage investors into the market and thus deliver more housing. Meanwhile, demand-side rent supports and help-to-buy schemes, along with loosening mortgage lending criteria, ensure that consumers have enough cash to keep up with ever-higher prices. These measures are based on the seemingly logical assumption that boosting construction and putting money into people's pockets will improve affordability [12]. However, supply-side savings are rarely, if ever, passed onto consumers, while greater availability of capital on the demand-side simply drives inflation. In any case, what does it say about the market if both buyers and sellers require some form of state intervention in order to engage in trade [13]? Is this not precisely the kind of unnatural interference that Adam Smith's disciples warn about? Perhaps the invisible hand is fudging the numbers.
More importantly, what does it mean for a society in which self-worth is measured by one's ability to independently purchase a home, if most people can't manage to do so [14]? The late anthropologist and historian of debt David Graeber argued that, in contemporary western societies, the traditional hierarchy of value has become disordered such that the symbolic or cultural value of home, as well as its fundamental utility as a place to live, have been subordinated to its exchange value [15]. Put simply, we have come to confuse value with price. Often, questions of affordability are met with appeals to viability, a byword for profitability. Yet the assumptions that underly viability calculations – land and construction costs, contingencies, profit margins – are rarely interrogated. Instead, we question the protective, democratic mechanisms of planning and building control, subjecting them to a persistent smear campaign designed to pressure the state into underwriting an ever-greater share of development risk.
So what would it look like to meaningfully commit to the vision of a society that provides housing for all? The Irish Cities 2070 group points out that securing the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of Ireland's rapidly growing population – as well as achieving our ambitious and necessary sustainability goals – is entirely reliant on creating and maintaining attractive, compact, well-designed and connected urban settlements [16]. Yet, by centring commercial viability in debates around housing as though it were as natural a consideration as safety, comfort, beauty or belonging, we privilege the needs of enterprise over those of the people it ultimately serves. Perhaps a first step, then, is to question our assumptions about the nature and causes of housing crises – are they just unfortunate by-products of an otherwise reliable system? Or have we in fact designed a system that reliably produces crises? Most critically, we must ask: who benefits from the whole situation?
In considering such questions, rather than being led by an invisible hand, maybe it's time we followed our gut.
While issues of climate change, disease, or even conflict may be explained away by sceptics as natural phenomena, the global shortage of accommodation can only ever be man-made. This article considers the contemporary discourse around housing in Ireland, calling attention to inherent contradictions both in our diagnosis of the problem and in our prescribed treatments.
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Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, our peatlands are an active cultural landscape. [1] Liked or loathed, most people have experienced ‘a day on the bog’, [2] time spent with neighbours and extended family that has created a strong emotional tie to peat cutting. The state has encouraged this too: the establishment of Bord na Móna in the 1940s created whole new communities, building housing and fostering economic development. [3] Coupled with the economic necessity of a cheap fuel source, a desire to be self-sufficient, and the sense that a way of life is being brought to an end without consultation, significant resistance to peatland restoration has emerged in the midlands.
Ireland’s peatlands contain 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon, [4] but 1.9 million tonnes are lost every year as drained, exposed peat releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. [5] Left alone, the peatlands would continue to contribute hugely to our carbon emissions, and fragile, scarce habitats would continue to vanish. Doing nothing is not an option. Restoration requires huge work: drains to be blocked and filled, invasive species to be removed, sphagnum inoculation, and monitoring of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. People are needed.
However plans for much of the peatlands see rewilded landscapes combined with wind or solar energy parks powering data storage. [6] These futures show the bog returned to an imagined natural state, a depopulated wilderness, all trace of its unique industrial heritage removed. It would become a place devoid of people, aside from those passively using the bog as a recreational amenity.
Against this narrative of wilderness stands a history of vernacular architecture and construction in the bog. Relatively unsuited to human beings, bogs have forced us to employ technology, tools, and architecture whenever we encounter them. The nature of that construction can tell us about our changing relationship to these landscapes.
Throughout prehistory, timber toghers (causeways), platforms, and crannogs were built in the bogs. The toghers sometimes crossed the bog, but often stopped abruptly in the middle. It has been speculated that as well as a means of crossing from one side to the other, they may have provided access for foraging, or even spiritual labour, many toghers contain or are surrounded by ritual deposits. [7]
There is also much documentary evidence of Irish society’s changing relationship with the bog over the past 200 years. Accounts of people evicted from their houses finding temporary refuge on the bog are common; houses built from the barest of materials: the turf itself, brushwood, and sometimes even using the facebank of the bog as a rear wall. [8] Photographs from the nineteenth century onwards show woven creels and slide cars, turf barrows, footings, clamps and ricks. [9] Carefully assembled, temporary constructions for the processing of the turf as fuel.
From independence onwards, the government sought to use the bogs as an indigenous source of fuel, and for economic development of rural areas, finally establishing Bord na Móna in 1946. This period saw the bog itself transformed as a built artefact, a rural-industrial landscape of parallel peat fields and deep drains, a network of railways connecting to power stations and factories, workers’ housing and facilities, huge chimneys and cooling towers visible for miles around. Irreparable damage was done to the bog, but a physical legacy of a unique industrial vernacular was created, much of it now threatened or sadly already gone. [10]
The architecture of the peatlands is ingenious and economical, made from the materials at hand, and often designed to be easily dismantled or moved. It reveals that our presence on the bog is temporary, peripatetic, but at times it has also been a place of a place of refuge. We are guests of the bog. But for the most part we have also come to the bog to work, to forage it, or cut it for fuel, our relationship with the bog is defined by labour.
It is difficult to imagine a future where whole communities are again employed by the bog, but it is not difficult to imagine one where they maintain their emotional relationship and physical connection to the landscape. Across the midlands, community groups are engaging with one another and discussing ways to maintain their stake in their bogs, many are fully aware of the contradiction they face in trying to preserve the bog for future generations while still cutting it for economic or emotional reasons. Some are forming meitheals to engage in the work of peatland restoration and citizen science, importantly they seek to continue active roles in the stewardship of their bogs.
These are inventive and ingenious communities. At the outset of industrial harvesting, technology and expertise from across Europe was brought in, loanwords like ‘ganger’, ‘bagger’, ‘haku’, and ‘peco’ became part of a midlands vernacular, the imported technologies and machinery were reproduced and transformed in the Bord na Móna workshops to respond to the needs of specific landscapes and times.
The labour of the bog was supported by social spaces created by the workers, buildings known officially as ‘production centres’ are colloquially known as ‘tea centres’, likewise the mobile staffrooms on rails or sleds known as ‘tea huts’. These objects, sitting somewhere between machine and building, are made simply and directly using the materials and techniques available in the workshops, the design language of industry was domesticated by the workers, with spaces for sitting by a stove, making tea and frying sausages. [11] Regional variation emerged, with some structures common on the Longford / Roscommon bogs being unknown in Offaly.
Can this vernacular architecture be transformed from an agent of the exploitation of the bog, to an agent for its restoration? The truth that restoration of the peatlands will be labour intensive suggests that it could be. The communal nature of this work will require social and support spaces as peat harvesting before it did. Spaces for communities to gather that might partly replace the social function that peat harvesting currently provides; places for shelter for those visiting the bog or to safely pass through it; places that make space for people; and secure our bogs as living cultural landscapes.
Ireland's peatlands, covering 20% of the island, are in a state of massive change. Essential natural restoration of the bog comes with narratives of rewilding, a prospect that has prompted many midland communities to feel left behind. The architecture of the peatlands reveals a rich story of peoples’ presence in this landscape. Can these buildings help us reimagine our relationship with the bog?
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Whenever I visit a building my late grandfather Vincent designed, our past conversations resurface.
Glasnevin Parish Church, Our Lady of Dolours, is nestled into a bend on the Tolka River. It sits close to the river's edge where Griffith Park meets the National Botanic Gardens. Two interlocking pyramidal forms – one slightly smaller than the other – define its distinctive silhouette. The stepped heights allowing a wash of light to enter a lofty internal volume. Today, the church stands as a familiar and reassuring presence, a quiet landmark within its suburban surroundings. As with many modernist buildings of its time, its completion in 1972 was met with contention and scepticism. [1]
In post-war Ireland, church architecture was in transition. Following Vatican II (1962-1965), ecclesiastical architecture underwent a notable shift. Traditional ornamentation gave way to minimalist, modern spaces, defined by abstract iconography and an emphasis on community participation. The church was no longer just a place of worship, but a space designed to foster engagement and inclusivity. Glasnevin Parish Church was one of the first in Ireland to feature an integrated parish centre, reflecting this new community emphasis. The altar was allegedly centrally-sited so that no member of the congregation would be further than 100 feet (30 metres) from the celebrant. [2]
One of the leading figures in this transformation was Liam McCormick, who designed some of the most celebrated modern religious architecture in Ireland. His influence on Glasnevin Parish Church is unmistakable. Liam had previously designed a series of sloped-roof churches surrounded by moats, similar to Glasnevin. In an coincidental twist, Glasnevin hosts one of McCormick’s non-religious commissions: the Irish Meteorological Office, completed just seven years after Our Lady of Dolours. It echoes the church’s pyramidal form, creating an unexpected dialogue between two distinct, yet interconnected, structures.
At first glance, I can enjoy Glasnevin church simply as it is: an open, unembellished space—calm, uncomplicated. The low-level brickwork walls lining the perimeter feel sturdy and grounded, while above, an expansive panelised soffit glows with reflected daylight. The architecture speaks in a measured, deliberate tone, revealing its rationale with quiet confidence.
Then, the conversation begins – part memory, part projection. I recall that the exposed brick walls were a pragmatic choice, selected to minimise flood damage from the nearby river. The expressive I-beams anchoring each corner were not stylistic, but rather an efficient way to secure the structure to solid bedrock. Even the panelised soffit, with its rhythmic repetition, is made of inexpensive cement fiberglass boards, chosen for their acoustic performance and fire resistance.
It strikes me now how straightforward and accessible my grandfather’s approach to architecture was. Every design decision was rooted in engineering logic, the artistry is in the careful assembly of the elements.
Our Lady Seat of Wisdom at UCD Belfield was, remarkably, designed and constructed as a temporary structure in 1969. [3] It was commissioned by the Dublin Diocese, not University College Dublin itself, which was the cause for some student protest at its opening. Despite its intended impermanence, the modest church remains, quietly integrated into the campus landscape. When it first opened, during the transition period of Vatican II, news coverage referenced conflicting rituals: "the altar has been designed in such a way that mass can be celebrated either facing the congregation or in the more traditional way". [4]
In contrast to Glasnevin, Belfield’s church is low-lying and unobtrusive, its simple octagonal form presenting a consistent facade from all sides. The roof gently pitches from post to post, revealing a continuous clerestory, while a short steeple rises modestly from the centre. Considering its requirement for quick assembly and disassembly, the church follows many principles of modular design, employing standardised components that repeat within each segment. This approach gives the structure the clarity of a kit of parts, where each element is distinct yet contributes to a cohesive whole. A unique aesthetic emerges from the linear joint lines wrapping the interior, reinforcing the sense of order and rhythm.
When a building’s tectonics are honest and on display, its structural elements become an essential part of its identity. The act of exposing all the building components fosters a deeper connection to craftsmanship and tells a story of the construction. This honesty invites a conversation between the designer and the observer: every structural decision and material choice is laid bare, to be read, interpreted, appreciated, or debated. In this way, the church becomes a space where past and present intersect.
Learning from the rational, problem-solving approach in both churches has been invaluable to my own understanding of architecture and approach to design. Viewing architecture through the lens of engineering fosters collaboration; it reframes architectural design not as an aesthetic layer, one to be sacrificed for value engineering, but as an integral response to performance needs.
When architecture and engineering are approached as a shared effort, unexpected solutions emerge. Rather than instructing a collaborator to execute a predetermined idea, I have found it far more rewarding to ask, “What can be done?” rather than “Can you do this?”. When we foster shared ownership of design across disciplines, new avenues for exploration and innovation open up, ones that might otherwise remain undiscovered.
For me, these moments of engagement with architecture echo past discussions with my grandfather. Both Glasnevin Parish Church and Belfield’s Church serve as touchpoints – silent but enduring lessons in design and craftsmanship. I am grateful for their presence, each visit offering an opportunity to pick up where we left off in our conversations.
Architect Vincent Gallagher designed a variety of modern Irish buildings from the 1950s to the 1980s. While his projects differ greatly in programme, they consistently demonstrate innovation in technology and materiality. In this personal account, Donnchadha Gallagher revisits two of his grandfather’s Dublin churches, in Glasnevin and Belfield, reflecting on their design and legacy.
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