Workers Solidarity Movement

Saturday 8th of September saw another building occupied in Dublin as part of the Take Back the City campaign, this is the 3rd occupation in a little over a month.  The new occupied building is on 41 Belvedere Place as the video shows over 100 people gathered outside in support of the occupation.

Interesting bit of Dublin squatting history just went online, a video of the the 2003 attempt to squat the Disco Disco building at 41 Parnell square (West). The building had been vacant for well over a decade at that stage (and may still be?) but shortly after the squatters started securing the building a gang of heavies arrived down (10.55 in the video) and attacked them. The cops arrived and pushed their way into the building after the door had been partly opened to allow someone injured in the attack to seek medical attention.

The Barricade Inn was a squatted social centre in the centre of Dublin.  During the peak of its activity over the summer of 2015 hundreds of people were involved in putting on events in the space that thousands of people attended.  In this audio we talk to three WSM members who were involved in opening up and running The Barricade about what happened there and what lessons they drew from the experience. 

Hundreds of people responded to the High Court demanding the eviction of Apollo House by linking arms to form a protective ring around it.  The judge  refused the residents an extra week to find accommodation despite the housing minister failing to deliver what had been promised.

Ireland is in the depths of a severe homelessness crisis, with 7,000 people without a home. With the government refusing to act, some activists in Dublin did.  Apollo House was occupied by Home Sweet Home Eire on the 15th December, to intervene in the housing crisis and to save lives.

There are around 190,000 vacant buildings in Ireland, that's 27 houses for every homeless person.

A high court judge yesterday granted an injunction that directs the Home Sweet Home occupiers of Apollo House to vacate the building by noon on January 11th. This means that the occupiers will remain in the building until after Christmas which is some good news but it still means that the State is quite willing to forcibly eject people from safe accommodation back out onto freezing streets or into unsafe, sub standard accommodation.

This video was shot on the morning of the Apollo House injunction hearing at the High Court, 21st December.  As well as footage from outside the courts on our way there we had earlier visited the sites of other occupied buildings evicted in the last 20 months. We discovered all of them were still vacant and in most cases no visible work at all had been done on them.

About an hour ago the Apollo house occupation received a finally crafted piece of legalistic bullshit designed to divide homelessness activists from the professional services on 'Health & Safety' grounds. Health & safety has become the go to excuse for pushing people onto the streets, when the Halston street (ex) prison was occupied over the summer we say the same 'concern' this time over the fact that the pigeon shit found in that building was a health and concern safety. As we observed then there is plenty of pigeon street on the cold, wet streets of Dublin but now its winter and those streets are very much colder.

RTE Drivetime engaged in some shameful clickbait trolling on Twitter last night to try and get a few more listeners. While they have congratulated posh schools for engaging in token sleep outs they decided to directly attack the occupation of Apollo house and its bringing into use as an emergency shelter for homeless people.

And boy did it fall on its face. Normally far far more people will like a Tweet than reply to it. In this case though 201 people have posted angry replies and only 19 liked it. A far stronger message though had already been sent out when the occupiers Home Sweet Home Eire page attracted over 27,000 followers in 6 days and over 1500 people have actually volunteered to help keep the shelter open. Likewise so many donations of materials were received that within a couple of days out had to be announced that there was no room for more.