In 1801 the Act of Union between England and Ireland abolished the Irish Parliament and drastically reduced Dublin’s status. With no governmental duties to compel their presence in Dublin, the leading figures of the Ascendancy returned to England. The city fell into a decline from which it did not recover until 150 years later. Dispossessed peasants crowded into the Georgian houses that owners rented piecemeal, which reduced these once elegant structures to slums. Anyone who owed more than 10 shillings could be imprisoned, and, until the legislation was revised in 1864, Dublin’s jails overflowed with debtors.

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Overcrowding and even greater poverty were results of the collapse of smallholdings during the Irish Potato Famine (1845–49), when tens of thousands flocked into the city from the countryside. The 1997 Famine Memorial at Customs House Quay, designed and cast by the Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie, commemorates the period. Emigration, a major element in Irish life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, mounted after 1845, with England and the United States being the principal destinations of those leaving Dublin.

With the eventual easing of the Penal Laws in the second half of the 18th century, a Roman Catholic middle class emerged, sending its sons to university and into the professions. In 1829 the political dexterity of the Irish Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell achieved passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which finally repealed the Penal Laws and enabled Catholics to sit once again in the British Parliament. After reforms in Dublin’s municipal government, in 1841 O’Connell became the first Roman Catholic mayor of the city since the 17th century. For the first time in 200 years, Roman Catholic churches and schools were built, and in the 1850s the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College Dublin) opened on St. Stephen’s Green, with John Henry Newman as rector.

The first railway in Ireland was built in 1834, when a 7-mile (11.3-km) link connected Dublin with the port of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire). As a result, suburbs began to grow up along the coast to the south. Suburban development around the city continued and intensified over the next 70 years.

Although Dublin remained modestly prosperous on the surface, it was festering underneath. The city had some of the worst slums in Europe. Infant and child mortality rates were uncommonly high, with tuberculosis constituting a particular scourge; sanitation and hygiene were practically nonexistent. An investigation in 1910 revealed that 20,000 families were each living in just one room. A two-week survey of 22 public houses, or taverns, disclosed more than 46,000 women and 28,000 children among the customers.

As the 20th century opened, political tensions increased. In 1914 the Irish Party, through the Government of Ireland Act, secured Home Rule for the country, but when World War I erupted several months later, the act was suspended. For some years before the outbreak of the war, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB; popularly known as Fenians), who had been quiescent since the failure of their rebellion in 1867, had been secretly reorganizing. When war came they made plans for another rebellion against the British. With the help of the Irish Citizen Army, a small volunteer workingmen’s corps, and the Irish Volunteers (a militia partly under the influence of the IRB), a rebellion was launched on Easter Monday, 1916 (see Easter Rising). Leaders of the movement proclaimed an Irish Republic and formed a provisional government. The rebels occupied buildings in the centre of the city, which they held for a week. Commerce and industry came to a halt, and a quarter of the city’s population of 390,000 went on public relief.

Defeated, the surviving rebels were marched through the streets of Dublin to the jeers and abuse of the populace. But the establishment of martial law in Dublin, the execution of the leaders within 10 days, and the mass imprisonment of those thought to be implicated in the uprising roused Irish public opinion as the rebellion itself had not. Guerrilla warfare by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) spread through the country in 1919, continuing through two years of terror and counterterror. Dublin was one of the worst-affected areas in Ireland and for much of those two years was subject to martial law.

A compromise treaty was concluded in 1921 establishing the Irish Free State, but an antitreaty contingent of the IRA opposed it and took possession of the Four Courts building in 1922. That summer the rebels were driven out by force, an event that marked the start of 11 months of bloody civil war between the factions that were for and against the treaty. Once again Dublin suffered heavily in the conflict. The end of the civil war in 1923 did not mean the end of gunfire in the streets, however. Political assassinations and armed raids continued into the early 1930s, and hostilities remained a marked feature of Dublin life for more than a generation.