VIII DUBLIN’S POOR CHILDREN IN A TRANSITIONAL IRELAND: DISEASE, AGENTS OF CHANGE … AND FLIES Ida Milne INTRODUCTION In the late summer of 1911, Sir Charles Cameron, the veteran Medical Officer of Health for Dublin, offered a bounty of three pence on paper bags filled with dead flies, hoping that boys in the tenements might be tempted to the hunt. The immediate impetus for this creative scheme was an outbreak of infant diarrhoea during a heatwave in August and September. Infant mortality rates from diarrhoea rose significantly in Irish urban areas especially Dublin and also across Britain, Europe and North America, causing a problem when the mercury reached higher than average temperatures. The diarrhoea epidemic among Dublin’s poor children was exacerbated by the appalling conditions of tenement living: one third of the city’s population lived in dilapidated tenements, some 21,133 families lived in just one room dwellings, often sharing a bed, with a bucket or chamber pot for a toilet, running water only available from an outside tap and sharing an outside privy with other families living in the house. 1 Cameron, who was a frequent and empathic visitor to the homes of Dublin’s poor as he tried to ameliorate their conditions had noticed that flies seemed to be plentiful in those homes where children were suffering from diarrhoea. 2 He described a scene from a one room tenement in Foley Street, where he saw an unusually large