Killarney Street

Killarney Street runs from the Five Lamps to Buckingham Street. It originally formed part of Lower Gloucester Street, now Sean McDermott Street, until it was renamed in 1901.

The renaming of the street gives us first-hand evidence of the attitude of the Corporation to the terrible conditions in which large numbers of the inhabitants of the city lived.

When asked to rename the street, the Paving Committee asked for evidence to back up the request. The memorial subsequently received set out the concerns of the owners and tenants of the street. In summary, Upper Gloucester Street was by then almost all tenements, and this had reduced the value of the houses on Lower Gloucester Street. The houses in that part of the street were still ‘self-contained houses’, but had seen a ‘very marked decline’ in their value.¹

The memorial was submitted by thirty-three people, of whom six were tenants. Of the remaining twenty-seven, five owned thirty-seven properties between them, the largest single landlord owning eleven.

To be fair to the tenants and the owners of individual houses, it would be hard to blame them for being concerned about the deterioration of the streets where they lived.

Having said that, the argument put forward was based on the value of the houses, and this was the argument accepted by the members of the Paving Committee.

Members of the Corporation were complicit in the tenement house system. The later 1914 Housing Inquiry found that fourteen councillors owned tenements, with three of them owning over 60 houses between them.²

In keeping with their usual approach to these requests,³ the Paving Committee recommended that the name be changed, and this was adopted by the full Council, with no discussion, on 12 August 1901.⁴

1. Reports 1901/85.
2. Departmental Committee appointed by the Local Government Board for Ireland to inquire into the housing conditions of the working classes in Ireland, Report [Cd. 7282], H.C. 1914 (XXXVIII).
3. See the entry for Dorset Lane for another example, but there are many others.