A black and white photograph showing a number of children outside a tenement house on Henrietta Street.

Throughout the first half of the century, nearly a third of Dublin’s population lived in overcrowded tenements. The tenement system had its origins in the middle of the 19th Century, when Dublin saw an influx of people from the countryside in the wake of the Famine. In the words of archaeologist and historian Christiaan Corlett, “a Dublin solution was found to a Dublin problem,” when many fine Georgian residences were converted to house far more people than they were originally designed to accommodate. In 1913 John Cooke presented his pictorial account of the city’s slums to the Dublin Housing Inquiry. The photographs now form part of the archive of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. They represent a grim and highly vivid account of the slum conditions at that time.