19/08/2026
The Notorious Landlords
I first came across stories about slum landlords in the 1970s, when I was audio-recording stories about the Dublin tenements. During one of the many interviews I had with elderly people, one person told me about her landlord in who owned tenement houses in Summerhill: This story is similar to other stories I recorded in the 1970s and the 1980s.
“Oh, he was a terrible landlord, a dirty old man. He owned the tenement house I was living in. It had ten rooms and a big family in every one of them. This was 1930, but he lived in a big house on the south side of the Liffey.
“How I knew where he lived? My brother saw him a few times going into his big house. He called for his rent money every Monday, and I remember my mother getting up early and running down to the pawnshop in Gardiner Street to pawn my father’s suit. Now, he only wore the suit on Sunday going to Mass, and I would be in the pawnshop until Saturday and get it back out for Sunday.
“But the landlord thought nothing of evicting poor families with their children and bits of furniture—a bed and table and broken chairs—out onto the street for missing the rent.
“There were two families in our house who had nothing. When he’d call for the rent, I won’t mention the families’ names, I could hear him talking to the poor woman. She’d say, ‘Oh, Mr Dunn, I haven’t got your rent because my husband got no work during the week. Please, can you leave it over until next week, and I will try and make it up for you next week on the double.’
“The woman was a nice-looking woman, and he’d say to her, ‘Is your husband in?’ When he found out he wasn’t in, he’d say to her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m going down to the basement. Follow me down in a few minutes and we can sort out the rent.’
“The poor woman used to go down to see him in the basement. And there was the other woman. She had to send her daughter, who was about fourteen years of age, down to the basement to see him.
“That’s the way some of those landlords carried on with poor people.”
