May 21 1924
The Corporation of Dublin has ceased to exist. Its disappearance may be temporary – but, for the time, it is effective.
Dublin is an ancient city. Some settlement existed near the mouth of the Liffey before the Danes seized on the “Ford of the Hurdles” and transformed it into a walled town – a fortress and a centre of sea-borne commerce.
Its charter dates from the early years of the “Norman conquest”; its mayor got the title of “Lord” in the reign of Charles II; he was regarded as “the First Citizen of Ireland”, and the Corporation was the country’s premier municipal body. Many great Irishmen have been Lord Mayors of Dublin – Daniel O’Connell was one.
And the Free State Minister of Local Government decreed yesterday that “the Council of the County Borough of Dublin shall be, and the same is hereby, dissolved”. Three commissioners will carry on the business hitherto transacted by the Corporation. They shall “severally hold office until the minister shall otherwise determine”.
It was a drastic administrative step; the people of Dublin can decide for themselves whether or not their elected Corporation deserved abolition.
Undoubtedly the general conduct of civic affairs in the Metropolis was open to grave censure. Barely half the Aldermen and Councillors took the slightest interest in the city’s affairs; fifty were absentees: and those who were not habitual absentees were, by a majority, political mischief-makers.
But the worst alleged against Dublin’s Corporation by its critics could not be compared with the tremendous indictment of Belfast’s Corporation launched less than a year ago in a local morning paper – and since repeated at frequent intervals. It was not much corruption so much as carelessness that was charged to the discredit of the Dublin Corporators; and the Dublin Evening Telegraph admitted yesterday that “For the deplorable conditions of Dublin today the citizens of Dublin are blameable”.
When people fail to take their public duties and responsibilities seriously, when 50 per cent of the electorate act on the principle that affairs of citizenship are no concern of theirs, places like Belfast and Dublin and centres of greater and less importance get the representatives and the service they deserve.
The capital of Ireland has been humiliated, says our Dublin evening contemporary. But all Ireland has been tortured and humiliated first.