Dublin and Dublin's Children

...As trade and fashion forsook Dublin after the union, the fine houses that had been built in desirable districts began to be let to families who would take a couple of rooms in them...

...But how fortunate these children are—for long months they have blue skies above them, they have warmth, they have uncfowded spaces to go into...

...Then a single room sheltered a family— often more than one family...

...At all hours of the day one encounters children—-in the streets, in the 'parks, in the churches...

...There is a children's Dublin without doubt, and I have been in hopes that one of Dublin's writers— James Stephens, say—would get to know it, and would bring us into it...

...I was a Sinn Feiner all my life," says a little ehap of eight or nine to his companions as they promferi^de the pavement along Stephens's Green...

...Such is the tragic background to the lives of the children whom we see in the streets, in the parks, in the churches, so independent, seemingly, and so selfcontained...

...All the patients are under One year of age...

...They are characteristic of the Dublin of our time—one might say that they are special to the Dublin of our time—and they are altogether different from the tenements that suggest a 1 problem in housing in New York or any other American city...

...with its hills -and its bay...

...Old houses become single-room tenements—that is the tenement problem in Dublin...

...These old houses turned into tenements, with a family or families living in one room, make up Dublin's dreadful slum-area—a slum-area that spills over into the city's fine places, and that has left its mark upon the faces and the bodies of so many decent Dublin people...

...Then there is the Dublin of the children...

...Follow one of these groups and you will hear conversations that have seriousness and continuity—a seriousness and a continuity that are often dissipated on the levels above childhood...

...It is true that eveti while the light on the city is at its clearest, one is^aware of habitants, who, as the policeman told the eharWbman's daughter in James Stephens's delightful stbry^ are from by stealth, eat by subterfuges, drinku by dodges, get married by antics, and slide into death by strange subterranean passages...

...through it, too, come all the goods that Ireland buys abroad...

...In Dublin more than in any other city I have ever been in, there seems to be a child-solidarity...

...they have reflection, they have humor...

...One can see it as Gfcorge Moore saw it on a certain memorable afternoon, when "the houses on the other side, the 'quays themselves, the gulls floating between the bridges;, everything seemed to have put off its habitual reality, to have sloughed it, and to have acquired another-^-a reality that we meet in dreams...

...In Dublin I have always expected to come upon a complete stib-adult world, with a folk-mote that regulates the relations of all these child-groups to each other...

...But the adults of the classes who could do so, have done little so far to help the children—these children who look so quick, so intelligent, so resourceful, and who seem, too, to have a gift of happiness...

...They go about in groups with 1 their little leaders, boys and girls, quite detached from parents, guardians, and elders of every kind...

...with its Green and its great park, and its river-walks...

...Dublin is a distributive rather than a manufacturing town —the cattle* sheep, pigs, butter, eggs, and other products that Ireland sells abroad pass through the port of Dublin...

...There are 251 families living in houses condemned as "dangerous to the public safety...

...Many cases are of undernourishment...

...What is life like in one of these tenements...

...It is astonishing on what little revenue it is operated—less than $10,000 for the year 1924...

...The parents of most of the children who draw one's interest as one sees them going about in their self-contained little groups, suffer under desperate handicaps—casual employment, low wages, a shortage of decent houses for working people to live in...

...The sight of eighty-four children in one house—not a house arranged in apartments, but an ordinary dwelling-house—made a reformer take up the task of getting houses built for the poorer people...

...The children of the poor of Dublin know the misery of cold knd damp...

...And all the children of Dublin seem to have an interior life...

...they live and they play in streets that are scotirged with tuberculosis...

...A lives on the top floor with husband and six children, eldest seven years, youngest three weeks...

...work is, to a great extent, unskilled...

...There is hardly anything manufactured to balance this merely distributive business...

...In 1914, in a city of about 400,000 people, there were 21,000 families living in single rooms...

...And well do they meet their responsibilities, these children...

...And there is--another aspect that is even more easily recalled...

...One has seen little groups in the Colosseum that are quite self-contained, particles of a sub-adult world...

...One sees child-groups that exercise a like independence in Rome, and, perhaps, in other Italian cities...

...Inevitably, with employment so unpromising, so casual, there is a drift to the lodginghouses and the tenement-houses...

...The tenementhouses...

...They are pallid and ailing for want of air, as the mother is not able to carry the baby-carriage up and down the stairs...

...Many of them are brought up under conditions in which child-mortality is twenty-six times as great as it would be in surroundings that we would regard as being nothing more than just decent...

...It may be that a Saint Ultan's Society will sometime be able to do something for the sound children who should be the pride of Dublin, and help to get what is badly needed by them—better accommodations in the schools, more and better playgrounds, and libraries that have a variety of publications of interest to children...

...Hard-wrought parents have to throw a great deal of responsibility upon children of eight, ten, or twelve...

...The houses became dingier and dingier...

...I have been in Saint Ultan's, and I have been impressed by the way that the children are taken care of —tenderly, and, as it seemed to me, upon sound lines...

...Saint Ultan's is for the treatment of infants suffering from non-infectious diseases...

...A great help to Dublin and the Dublin children would be a neighborhood house of the kind that is in many American cities...

...Hence, employment is casual...

...Families in Dublin mean many children...

...Here Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish children—we must not forget that there is a Jewish population in Dublin—are healed...

...The retfrark is received with becoming seriousness...

...However, something at last is being done, and a hospital has been established, named for that Irish saint who was called "the great sinless prince in whom the little ones are flourishing.11 In Dublin, out of every 1,000 babies, 164 die before reaching the first year...

...One sees it on forenoons with great, grey clouds above it, and poising sea-birds...

...The children do much—more than should be asked of them—to lighten the burden of the adults...

...There are 20,000 people living in insanitary houses—3,000 insanitary houses...

...It is the only hospital of its kind in Ireland...

...more and more families came to live in them...

...Saint Ultan's might sometime be able to organize and keep going a neighborhood house in one of the streets of single-room tenements...

...You may see a little girl tidy up a room in a tenement, do the buying for the household, take her brothers and sisters to school, entertain them and their friends after school, take them to a promenade along the streets, or to play in the Green or the park, and provide them with information about the whole world, and teach them their catechism besides...

...with streets that everyone avoids, and M with other streets that everyone parades...

...In 1924, there were 40,000 families living in such tenements...