16/08/2024
A city is a living thing, A network of streets and alleys, an ecosystem. Interlocking communities coexisting & developing one pedestrian/inhabitant at a time. Day by day until 1 day a thousand years have passed and the place would look unimaginable to the first pedestrian who existed there a thousand years ago.
Bride Road or Bóthar Bhríde is one such place. In many ways it predates Dublin as here, before the vikings arrived and established our future capital, stood an ancient Irish church* belonging to the followers of Brigid from Kildare. Just a few hundred years after the supposed establishment of her abbey in Cill Dara, her followers were also now living and working just outside Átha Cliath.
A thousand years later, a street in a city which had yet to be born but would one day engulf this church, still bears her name.
Nowadays the ancient church that her followers built is gone. It had fallen into disrepair by the end of the 19th century whence Edward Cecil Guinness purchased the land in order to help the poverty stricken people of the area known as The Liberties.
The Liberties had been a hub of Irish artisanal work, industries which had all but collapsed after the Act of Union in 1800.
The horrors of what was to unfold throughout the 19th century, with An Gorta Mór in particular, led to many rural people migrating to Dublin to seek better fortune. Many of them settled in this area and the resulting slums which developed in the region led to it becoming the poorest part of what was fast becoming Europes poorest city.
So it was that the Iveagh Trust was established by Guinness to revitalise the area.
They built three vast blocks of Tenement buildings which consisted of 584 rooms in total to house the impoverished people of that region with the express vision of building a community where residents could self-improve upon their conditions. They established resident councils to run the affairs of each building.
The Iveagh trust still does this work today, providing homes to 1700 families right across Dublin and runs the largest homeless hostel in the city too.
*The second picture shows where the church once stood.
