THE HOUSING CRISIS may be regular front-page news, but data from 1911 shows Dublin’s overcrowding problems are nothing new – and were once far worse.

Nearly a quarter of Dublin’s population was living in one-room tenements in 1911, according to newly released data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), which sheds light on the scale of overcrowding and housing inequality in Ireland in the early 20th century.

The figures are part of a new release titled Stories from Census 1911: Tenement Living, based on digitised records from the Census of Ireland.

The CSO said it aims to bring historical housing statistics to life through interactive maps and data visualisations.

At the time, Dublin City had a population of just over 305,000.

Henrietta Street on the North side of Dublin city. Rolling News Rolling News

Of the 35,477 inhabited houses in the city, 21,133 were one-room tenements.

That means 60 out of every 100 homes consisted of just one room, with 70,000 people -almost one in four city residents – living in these confined spaces.

“There’s a lot that’s been written about tenement living, but this release quantifies and brings it to life,” said Ciara Hayes, statistician at the CSO.

“We found a number of instances where at least 12 people were officially recorded as living in a single room.”

Twelve to a room

Records show that five tenements in Dublin had 12 or more people living in one room.

Six such cases were found in Mayo, including in Belmullet rural district, which had 14 one-room tenements for every 100 houses, among the highest rates in the country outside Dublin.

While overcrowding in the capital has long been acknowledged as a feature of Dublin’s history, the new data provides a direct comparison between urban centres across the island.

Despite having a larger population of 387,000 at the time, Belfast had just 1% of its homes classified as one-room tenements, compared with 60% in Dublin.

The contrast is attributed in part to Belfast’s booming industrial economy, driven by shipbuilding and textiles. In 1911, more than 36,000 people in Belfast were employed in textile-related industries, compared with just over 3,000 in Dublin.

The CSO’s analysis also includes a comparison of individual households, drawn from the census records.

One is the Lavelle family from Belmullet in Mayo, where a married couple and their ten children lived in a one-room thatched home.

The children under the age of seven were recorded as being unable to read. Another is the Hanlon family from the Rotunda area of Dublin, where a couple and nine children lived in a single room with a slate or tiled roof.

The older children worked as van drivers or factory hands. The younger children were listed as ‘scholars’ but were also described as unable to read or write.

Housing conditions in Dublin in the early 1900s were among the worst in the United Kingdom.

The situation contributed to the 1913 Dublin Lockout, and was brought into sharp focus that same year when two tenement buildings collapsed on Church Street, killing seven people.

Landlords in power

A government inquiry published in 1914 found that several members of Dublin Corporation, then responsible for managing the city, were also landlords.

One councillor owned 27 tenement houses, and ten others owned between one and three.

Despite the poor state of the housing, many of these landlords were receiving tax rebates on their properties.

The report criticised the authorities for allowing the situation to deteriorate, saying the absence of proper governance had “created a number of owners with but little sense of their responsibilities as landlords”.

Slum clearance efforts did not begin in earnest until after independence, and tenements continued to exist well into the 1960s.

While one-room tenements were most concentrated in urban centres like Dublin, Limerick (17 per 100 homes), Cork (13), and Galway (8), the CSO also found significant overcrowding in coastal rural districts.

The new release is available through the CSO’s open data platform, PxStat, and includes digital maps and detailed breakdowns by urban and rural district.

“This gives us a more nuanced picture of tenement living,” said Hayes.

“It helps us understand how both poverty and housing were distributed across the country, and the conditions so many people endured.”