Peter CostelloThis book was of special interest to me. Behind the house in which I grew up in Rathmines was a triangular plot of land, a left over between three earlier developments. In the late 1940s and early 1950s this allotment was cultivated by unemployed men from the Mount Street Club. They disappeared towards the middle of the decade, but ever since I have wondered about them and about what exactly the Mount Street Club was.
Now I know, for this book explains it all. In time when we have faced through once again serious economic reversals which were nothing like the poverty – and the massive emigration – of earlier decades, there are surely lessons to be learnt from this history. The authors are Peter Somerville Large (well known as a travel writer and historian) and Mary Daly (the noted historian of 19th-Century Dublin).
The Mount Street club was the brainchild of a Patrick Somerville-Large, the author’s father, and some of his friends. Set up in 1934, it worked by enrolling unemployed men and issuing them with tokens for meals and accommodation in exchange for work on farms, allotments, and craft shops.
Humnan dignity
It preserved their human dignity not by giving a mere handout as social welfare does today, or useless work as was the way in Victorian times. A social need was answered by a social response which it was hoped would benefit both the men and the whole community.
In an era when the notion of employment seems to increasingly depend in the minds of many on global investors, rather than small scale enterprise, this book reads with interest. The successes were real.
But there is also much to be learned from why the scheme failed, and how the original resources were remodeled to meet new needs for work, training and socialisation. It chimed with Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, with Farms Works Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and even the Federal Writers Project. We never seem to hear these days about this one brave and ultimately successful scheme for coping with 1930s unemployment in the USA.
However, the sad truth we have to realise as we face years of celebrations of war and revolution is that full employment only came to the USA again with the outbreak of World War II. We all long for peace and plenty, but war and work seem in past times to have been inseparable.
Unlike many books about such activities, the authors have the experience and the wider knowledge to give depth and dimension to what they write, setting the Mount Street Club in a social and national framework. It was a unique kind of response to problems which, one way or the other, remains with us to this day. Now a trust, the Mount Street Club has evolved with the times: the farm is gone, instead training and retraining are provided in more appropriate skills.
This book fills out a gap in the history of social history and provision for the unemployed in Dublin, and will be read with great interest by everyone interested in the still evolving history of the Ireland’s capital.