A farm animal had more value than these humans lives. In 19th century Ireland 51% of the population lived in what was described as 4th class housing.

37 comments

  5. My great-grandfather was evicted because his father had the absolute neck to give another evicted family shelter in his cowshed after they’d been burned out of their own cottage by the land agents and the RIC. .

  6. Is this a suggestion on how to solve the crisis ?

    Because am not allowed to go out in to some random bit of grass and build a structure to live in anymore.

    The woobs will be after me or worse some farmer dude with a shooty.

    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_War)

    Maybe we need another one of these.

  7. It’s pretty damning for us a society that we still allow about 20% of the population of Roscommon to live in houses like that.

  11. House? They were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, all 126 of us, no furniture, half the floor were missing, we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling…

  12. My cottage is from 17-and-a-bit and I’m in here every winter wondering how people even dealt with that before central heating. Parish records say there was 16 to the place at one point. Glenveagh is round the corner and everyone got burned out of that area cause some lord wanted bigger hunting grounds.

  18. To be fair, those in the photo legit get to say…..”back in my day we had to walk 20 miles in the snow/rain/fog with no shoes etc etc”

  19. With a clear sky, this east facing residence is bathed, internally, with natural morning light once a year… on the winter solstice.

  21. My mams neighbour had to keep the cow at the bottom of their rented cottage, they had no land of theyre own. That was the twentieth century.

  22. I was looking up the residence of my 4th great-grandfather on Griffith’s valuation. He lived in a hen house during the famine. I didn’t even notice it until a distant relative of mine who descended from his brother had also been working on it brought it to my attention, as the transcribed record just states “house”, but the original field book states it was a “hen house”.

    He later moved across the river to Waterford, but I can only imagine the miserable conditions he was living in.

  23. in Iraq there was a guy riding his tractor and had his kids walk in front of it so they would set off IEDs because the tractor was more valuable to him I guess

  25. Kind of mad to think that was somewhat the norm here at that point when in other parts of the world like England, America, Italy and France some of history’s most impressive technological advances were already made and or being made while living in relative modernity and comfort.

  27. Ive often thouhht that the massive emphasis on social interaction, family life and the arts in Irish culture is due partly to it being a super fertile country with a temperate climate. If you wanted to get married you could just find a plot and build your own adequate house, heat it with turf you cut, live off your herd and your vegetable patch (later, potatoes). My family is from a “congested district,” and you can still see the remains of old ricks everywhere, even way up on hillsides. With it requiring almost no capital to start a family, why would you bother with boring stuff?

  32. The word dystopia as the opposite of utopia was invented by John Stuart Mill in a parliamentary speech in 1868 to describe the British governance of Ireland.

  37. Shocking to think of people living in those conditions at a time when photography was already around, especially considering the Irish climate.

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