Dublin is one of the oldest capital cities in Europe – dating back over a thousand years. Over the centuries and particularly in the 18th century or Georgian era, it acquired a distinctive style of architecture. Since the 1960s, Dublin has been extensively re-developed, sometimes resulting in the replacement of earlier buildings. Some of this has been controversial with preservationists regarding the development as unwelcome.
Georgian Dublin
In 1932, Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil party won a majority at the general election. With greater finances available, major changes began to take place. A scheme of replacing tenements with decent housing for Dublin's poor began. Plans were proposed for the wholesale demolition of many buildings from the Georgian era, which had become tenements.
The Viceregal Lodge was proposed for demolition, to make way for a new residence for the new office of President of Ireland, an office created in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Merrion Square, with its large Georgian mansions, was proposed for demolition, to be replaced on its three sides by a national museum, national Roman Catholic cathedral and national art gallery. Though plans were made, few were put into effect and those not implemented were put on hold when in September 1939 World War II began. Dublin escaped the mass bombing of the war due to Ireland's neutrality, though some bombs were dropped by the German air-force and hit the North Strand, a working-class district.
By 1945, the planned replacement of Georgian Dublin were abandoned and the Viceregal Lodge (renamed in 1938 Áras an Uachtaráin) was restored as a presidential residence.
From the 1950s onwards, Georgian Dublin became imperilled by Irish Government development policies. On Mountjoy Square derelict sites proliferated. When a row of large Georgian houses in Kildare Place near Leinster House was demolished a Fianna Fáil minister, Kevin Boland celebrated, saying that they had stood for everything he opposed. He also condemned the leaders of the Irish Georgian Society, established to preserve Georgian buildings, some of whom came from aristocratic backgrounds, as "belted earls".
In the 1960s, the world's longest line of Georgian buildings was interrupted when the ESB was allowed to build a modern office block. By the 1980s, road-widening schemes by Dublin Corporation ran through some old areas of the inner city around Christ Church Cathedral. In 1979 Dublin Corporation developed an office block on an unearthed Viking site Wood Quay.
1980s – A change in policy
In the 1980s and 1990s, greater efforts were made to preserve Dublin's older buildings. Dublin Corporation's road-widening schemes were abandoned. Strict preservation rules were applied, keeping intact the remaining squares, though St Stephen's Green of the three southern squares had already lost much of its Georgian architecture.
The 1960s had seen one of the earliest battles to preserve Georgian Dublin, in what became known as the Battle of Hume Street whose corner opened onto St. Stephen's Green. There an ultimately successful attempt by a property developer to demolish a block of Georgian houses hit the national headlines, and became a cause célèbre as students, celebrities and future politicians battled to stop the demolition of the Georgian buildings. The original buildings were lost, and the developer built Georgian style buildings on the site.
By the 1990s Dublin Corporation became active in the preservation of the Georgian buildings; among the results was the restoration of City Hall to its eighteenth-century interior (removing Victorian and Edwardian additions and rebuilds), and the replacement of Nelson's Pillar (a monument on O'Connell Street which had dominated the skyline until being blown up in 1966 by republicans) by a new Spire of Dublin, the world's tallest sculpture, on the site of the old Pillar and which could be seen throughout the city.