Workers Solidarity Movement

Today 8 housing activists from An Spreach Housing Action Committee and from D8HAC were up in court. All 8 were charged with trespassing on the 29th of July 2014 in a vacant flat in Charlemount Street in Dublin’s south inner city. All charges were dismissed by the court. This is a small victory for the housing groups, but the struggle continues it is not the end of the campaign to highlight the homeless and housing crisis.

You'd think Enda Kenny had never seen a homeless person before. In the wake of the sad death of Jonathan Corrie, who was sleeping rough in the shadow of Dáil Éireann, Ireland's parliament, the Taoiseach went walk about in the city centre to meet Dublin's homeless. In an interview with the media, he said he was "taken aback" by what he saw. 

Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, whisked around the capital by the ghost of Christmas present, he got a first hand view of the conditions that people without homes or hostel places have to endure. He saw the effects of addiction, the sleeping bags and the syringes, that dominate the lives of those who have been left at the margins. But, it's hard to believe that he didn't know this was happening; It's difficult to imagine, that after three and a half years in power, he has suddenly had a Scrooge like epiphany, and is going to pull out all the stops to transform the lives of the country's homeless people. 

Decades of lack of investment in social housing and the growing housing crisis in Dublin means that Dublin city council now appear to be considering building temporary slum housing. That's not of course what they are calling it but Assistant chief executive and head of housing Dick Brady has revealed a plan to house families in prefabs on derelict sites.

The madness that is Dublin housing bubble being rapidly re-inflated need to be opposed, not celebrated. Unlike estate agents & the media we recognise rising home prices are not good thing. Unaffordable homes are going to make things much harder for those in lower paid employment in particular. And with almost no protection from landlords for tenants and rising rental prices this means many being stuck in insecure poor quality accommodation for years to come.

House prices in Dublin have increased by almost €200 per day every single day for the past year (and by €220 a day in the past month). Figures released by estate agents DNG reveal that the average cost of a home in Dublin is €349,000 – an increase of €71,000 since this time last year.

Even more frighteningly, prices at the lower end of the market (less than €250,000) are increasing at a faster rate than more expensive houses. This clearly affects people in lower paid employment and those struggling to buy a home disproportionately.

Over the years, Dublin’s working class has organised to fight landlords, developers and politicians in search of decent housing and well-being for all. This panel at the 9th Dublin anarchist bookfair considered how some of these earlier campaigns and direct actions can inform today’s struggles.

Dublin Housing Action: Past, Present and Future - Anarchist bookfair 2014 audio by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

Today (Weds) was very quiet; there was no eviction attempt. We were prepared for the worst, but no cops called around, nobody claiming to be the owner, nothing.Just to recap, we are preparing ourselves to resist eviction because previously, on Friday, two people claiming to be agents acting on behalf of a company, which they claimed own two of the houses, came to illegally board them up. When we weren't letting them do so, they called the cops. The cops decided not to do anything because they did not have the paperwork or legal authorisation to evict us^[1]. However, the “owners” and the cops did say that they'd be back on Wednesday (today) with “papers”.

A group of political squatters in Dublin are facing eviction from a row of empty, unused, rotting houses in Lower Grangegorman. We got a chance to speak to them and hear their side of the story. They are calling for people to come and help them resist eviction from Wednesday onwards.

-- 300,000 empty houses in Ireland, 5,000 people homeless --

Around lunchtime on April 15th we received word that there was an anti-eviction protest underway on Manor street in Dublin outside a house that had been squatted.  A Garda had called at the door that morning and after being refused entrance had said he'd be back later with more Garda. The building had been squatted on and off a couple of times in recent years and was recently re-occupied.

In the midst of a media storm over the flag protests our local politicians have one again nailed their colours to the flag that does not distinguish between green and orange- that of capital and greedy profiteering. The proposal by Stormont minister Nelson McCausland to scrap the Housing Executive originally set up to provide fair allocation of public housing is another pillar in the ongoing savage attacks on our class.

In September last year, we held an interview with a comrade from the OCL, a Chilean anarcho-communist (platformist) organisation with a presence in the biggest cities of that country - Santiago, Valpara’so and Concepcion. This organisation has a policy of building up the movement amongst the popular rank and file, organising Frentes (Fronts or Networks) among the traditional popular factors in revolutionary struggle in Chile: workers, students and neighbours from the slums of the cities.