Tá Éire ag Forbairt (Ireland is Building) was the confident title of a gleaming brochure issued by the first coalition government in 1949. It sought to contrast “the past” with “the present and future” by juxtaposing a photograph of inner-city tenements with a housing scheme in Sallynoggin, Co Dublin, designed by architect Dáithí Hanly, which involved the building of 1,000 houses – a mixture of semidetached and terraced units – on a 400-acre site.

The brochure was introduced by Michael Keyes, the Labour Party minister for local government, and Noël Browne, the Clann na Poblachta minister for health, announcing “the resources of the nation are being used to erect within 10 years 110,000 dwellings, costing £100,000,000″, and that “for success in these plans, more skilled workers are needed than are available at present in Ireland. We must bring back numbers of our craftsmen who left Ireland in less favourable times”. The great undertaking, it was promised, “will ensure full and constant employment for workers in all branches of building and in attendant industries” who “will live and work among their own people and they will enjoy the happiness of knowing that every day’s toil is given to freedom’s splendid task: the........

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