A local history project in Drumcondra unearths an original record and imagines the first owner’s housewarming party

On a recent Saturday, Margaret Cleary was sweeping up leaves on her driveway with a small dustpan and brush.

Above her wooden door is a piece of stained glass that reads “St Clare”. “There’s a story behind that too,” says Cleary as she walks through the door and into her hallway.

The original owners of this house on Walsh Road in the Drumcondra Triangle were the McNaneys, she says, and they had a young daughter named Clare.

Clare was knocked down by a bus and killed and her father made the stained-glass above the door in her memory, says Cleary, who moved into this house with her mother in 1959.

Her mother, who grew up on Walsh Road, knew the McNaneys and wanted to preserve the stained glass. “My mam would never get rid of it,” says Cleary, who is equally committed to retaining the piece.

Not everyone who lives in a 100-year-old house would know the history of the original occupants. So, a local history project organised by the Drumcondra Triangle Residents Association invites those who have come later to use public records to track the stories of those who lived in their homes before.

The association plans to piece together those stories and create a digital map of the neighbourhood.

It is one of several local history projects that residents are pursuing in the run-up to the centenary of the estate, which was completed in 1929 and, members of the neighbourhood association say, was the second major public housing project of the Irish Free State.

They are calling on residents to hang on to any original artefacts they find in their houses too and hope to hold an exhibition.

Those items can spark stories both real and imagined, says Chris Moran, one of the project organisers, who found an original vinyl record near the fireplace in his home when he moved in.

“It’s Chris Hall, ‘One Night in June’, and it’s from 1929,” says Moran. “Someone is probably having a house party when they got their keys and they are having a waltz around the sitting room.”

Growing up on the Drumcondra Estate

Cleary moved into this house she lives in now when she was nine years old.

Before that she lived with her grandparents further along Walsh Road, at number 70, where her grandparents were the original occupants.

In 1929, they moved from a tenement in the inner-city and these houses were a big step up, she says. There was fierce competition because they were also “rent to buy”. If tenants paid rent consistently, they owned the house after a set period.

Her grandfather queued outside the Dublin Corporation offices overnight, she says. “My granny always said that, that he camped out to get the house.”

The street looked different in the 1950s, says Cleary, looking out her front window. The original front gardens are now mostly driveways. Porches have been added on to the front of many of the homes.

Back in the ’50s, people went around on bicycles and children played on the streets, she says. “There were very little cars.”

“You didn’t lock the door,” says Cleary. “Everyone would have known everyone else.”

She remembers how as kids they would tie a rope to a lamppost to swing around with this self-made fairground ride.

But childhood was shorter too, she says, as many people went out to work aged 13 or 14.

Into the triangle

Originally called the Drumcondra Estate, the streets are laid out in the shape of a triangle.

The Drumcondra Triangle Residents Association was formed in 2017 and the group has renamed the area, says chairperson Shona Keeshan-Moran.

The Drumcondra Estate was the second major public housing project of the new Irish Free State. It was built shortly after Marino, she says.

Most of the new residents came from inner-city tenements, but would have been among the better-off families there, as they’d have had to have an income to pay the rent.

Colleen Brown and Chris Moran – both members of the residents’ committee – are behind several projects to bring the history of the estate to life in time for the centenary in 2029.

Moran grew up on this estate. “This was always home, I know every back garden and every lane,” he says, sitting and drinking tea at Brown’s kitchen table. “It’s fantastic it’s such a mix of people.”

Moran says the group has developed a guide to help people to use public resources like the Registry of Deeds to investigate the history of their own homes.

“A visit to the Registry of Deeds on Henrietta Street is highly recommended for the amateur historian or neighbourhood enthusiast,” says the residents association’s website.

Moran says he came up with the idea for the mapping project when he started researching local history and found the staff really helpful when he turned to public records.

He visited the Registry of Deeds, the Pearse Street Archives, the Dublin Diocesan Archives and Dublin City Council, he says – and would encourage others to follow.

Brown says the Drumcondra Estate was inspired by the garden estates in London. “It was a place where people could have enough space to grow their own potatoes and a way to move people out of the inner city.”

The plan was disrupted by the First World War, the revolution, and the Civil War, she says. But afterwards, the Free State followed through on it.

History is the hook

When a group of people got together and decided to rejuvenate the resident’s association, they figured the history of the area was a great way to spark a conversation.

“This history is the hook,” says Moran.

Since launching the project, they’ve had a lot of interaction with residents, dropping texts describing what they found out about the original owners, says Moran. People are so interested in finding out about who lived in their home before them.

Some residents found the names of the tradesmen who worked on the houses written on the walls and under skirting boards, he says.

As well as mapping all the information about the first owners of each house, the group wants to hold an exhibition of all the items left behind by the original owners.

Like that vinyl record that Moran found. He also found a breast pump from that era. “Some of it’s a bit of a treasure hunt,” he says.

Says Brown: “People are finding stuff, so it’s to make sure that everyone knows not to dump it.”

She discovered that the green tiles under her fireplace are the originals, she says. “Because we had a respect for the history of the place, we decided to keep them.”

Others have uncovered outdoor fridges, cubby holes in the walls outside that would have been used to keep things cold.

“It’s finding these pieces of gold so that people can discover the history of their own individual dwelling,” says Brown.

Even the local children take an interest, says Brown, especially when they are told things like that the Tesco building used to be a cinema.

Says Moran: “It’s a mosaic or a collage of people’s lives.”

[CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2.45pm on 24 January to correct the surname of the first owner of Margaret Cleary’s home. Apologies for the error.]