Who Paid for Ireland's Buildings?

ejmaztec

I'm thinking that some Unionists in NI have been reading orange history books.

A pair of them on social media maintain that places like Galway University, not to mention the whole of Dublin, were all built and paid for by the British, and to quote one of them "everything great about Ireland".

I'm sure that Ireland had enough money in the kitty to pay for its own buildings, and that even the "gentry" paid for their own buildings without any financial support from Britain.

Is my assumption wrong?

Peregrinus

Your assumption is correct.

As regards public buildings, for most of the period of the union (1800-1922) tax revenue collected in Ireland exceeded public expenditure in Ireland — i.e. there was a net transfer of taxpayer funds from Ireland to (much wealthier) Great Britain. So Irish taxpayers not only paid in full for all the public buildings in Ireland during this period; they also contributed to the cost of public buildings in Great Britain.

This state of affairs changed in the early twentieth century when, because of a large land purchase programme, public spending in Ireland began to exceed tax collected in Ireland so, on a year-by-year basis, there was a net transfer of public money from GB to IRL. But this was intended to be recouped over time; as we know, land purchased under this scheme was subject to a land annuity; the puruchaser had to pay off the cost of the land purchase over 80 or 100 years, so the money was to go back to to the Westminister government. (It was those payments that de Valera stopped in 1932, triggering the Economic War.)

(This pattern of poor colonies being heavily taxed and then transferring tax revenues to the much richer colonial power is typical. As noted, many of the grand buildings of Victorian London were part-financed by Irish taxpayers, but a much greater part was financed by Indian taxpayers.)

As for private buildings, there was no kind of public funding or subsidy available from the government The gentry paid for their own buildings, largely with borrowed money (privately borrowed, from Irish banks, etc). The idea was that the borrowings would be paid off over time out of estate income — rents paid by tenants, etc. In many cases owners had very rosy notions about the future income their estates would generate, and many estates were burdened for generations with the large debts that had been raised to build grand country houses and townhouses for the landlord. One of the reasons that so many estates were bankrupted during the famine is that they were so heavily mortgaged even before the famine, and when the rent roll dropped the owners could no longer service their loans.

Most of the grand public buildings in Dublin actually predate the Union — the Custom House, the Four Courts, etc are eighteenth century. They were built, needless to say, out of Irish revenue, not British revenue. The same goes for private buildings - the great Georgian streets and squares of Dublin are all eighteenth century. The union was economically disastrous for Dublin — it went into a long decline, and many of the grand private buildings of the eighteenth century were literal slums by the end of the nineenth century — Gardiner Street, Mountjoy Square, etc.

I'd be reasonably confident that there is no reputable economic historian who considers that the colonisiation of Ireland by England/Great Britain, and the later union of Ireland and Great Britain, were economically beneficial for Ireland.