All 1916'd out

The Rape of Lucretia wrote: »

Some of us were happily part of the United Kingdom. Celebrating terrorists and murderers guilty of treason and disregard for the rule of law an democracy, is a shameful attitude. I though Ireland had matured, but this nonsense shows we are still a rather backward provincial amateur statelet, rather than an integral part of a serious country like the UK that we could still be.
Sick to the teeth of it myself.

In 1911 Dublin had the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom. Its extensive slums were not limited to the back-streets or to impoverished ghettos. By 1911 the city slums also incorporated great Georgian houses on previously fashionable streets and squares. As the wealthy moved to the suburbs over the course of the 19th century, their huge, red-brick buildings were abandoned to the rent-paying poor. Tenements in inner-city Dublin were filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden, teeming with malnourished children and very much at odds with the elite world of colonial and middle-class Dublin.

..Alongside the cattle on many of those boats were emigrants leaving a country unable to offer even the possibilities of a basic existence. Some were Dubliners, many were from the Irish countryside and were merely passing through the city, certain in the knowledge that there was simply no work available to them. Behind them they left the brutal reality of daily life for tens of thousands who lived in tenement slums, starved into ill-health, begging on the fringes of society. In parts, Dublin was incredibly poor. A notoriously high death-rate was attributable, at least in part, to the fact that 33% of all families lived in one-roomed accommodation. The slums of Dublin were the worst in the United Kingdom, dark, disease-ridden and largely ignored by those who prospered in other parts of the city.

..In every aspect of mortality, Dublin in the last quarter of the ninteenth century held the unenviable record of being first among major towns and cities of Britain and Ireland. Indeed from Berlin to Brussels, from Rome to Stockholm and from Philadelphia to Boston,the death rates in major cities rarely exceeded those in the Irish capital