Lord Mayor Laurence O'Neill, Alderman Tom Kelly and Dublin's housing crisis
McManus, RuthORCID: 0000-0003-1477-8254
(2013)
Lord Mayor Laurence O'Neill, Alderman Tom Kelly and Dublin's housing crisis.
In: McManus, RuthORCID: 0000-0003-1477-8254 and Griffith, Lisa-Marie, (eds.)
Leaders of the City, Dublin's first citizens, 1500-1950.
Four Courts Press, Dublin, pp. 141-151.
ISBN 9781846824258
Laurence O’Neill, described on the occasion of his election to a fifth successive term
of office as a ‘popular, useful, independent and energetic Lord Mayor’,
was the last
person to hold the office under the British regime and the first to hold it under the
Free State administration. His term, then, straddled a very turbulent period in
Ireland’s political and social history. It began in the midst of the First World War and
continued through the ‘troubles’ of the early 1920s, coming to an end – perhaps- with
the abolition of Dublin Corporation in 1924. The word ‘perhaps’ is apposite, because
O’Neill did not vacate the Mansion House until 1925 and as late as 1926 a court case
failed to conclude that he was no longer lord mayor, with the judge suggesting that
‘probably’ he remained lord mayor.
In any case, it was O’Neill who was the
proposer, in 1930, of the next elected lord mayor of the city, that well-known and
charismatic leader Alfie Byrne, discussed in the following chapter.