Resistance Writings 2015
If anyone in Ireland is looking for solutions to housing shortages, there's a perfectly good, nine storey, ex-Department of Social Welfare building vacant on Tara Street, Dublin. A building that size, if converted, could house hundreds of people, there could be community facilities like a creche, a cafe, a gym, or other small businesses on the larger ground floor...? A smaller building directly across the street is also vacant. The old motor tax offices on Chancery Street are empty too.
There are buildings similar to Apollo House on many streets in Dublin, and in towns, villages and cities all over Ireland. At the same time, there are almost 100,000 families on social housing waiting lists, and tens of thousands more facing repossession hearings in the Registrar’s Courts. So, why is there absolutely no urgency in official Ireland to provide adequate social housing for the growing ranks of the working poor and under-employed ?
Alan Kelly, the Labour Party’s Minister for Homelessness, can see Apollo House, and other buildings like it, from his offices in the Custom House, just across the river; he probably passes it everyday on his way to and from work.
The upper stories of Apollo House can also be seen from the front door of SIPTU's Liberty Hall, where the 'Towards a Real Housing Strategy' conference took place yesterday. The day-long conference heard from housing activists, homeless families, social justice campaigners, politicians, and academics; a wide-range of ‘people centred’ solutions to housing need were discussed in smaller ‘workshop’ groups. http://www.right2change.ie/blog/tow... Various opinions and ideas throughout the day were reported on the facebook page of Housing Action Now https://www.facebook.com/HousingAct...
From the front of Liberty Hall you can see quite a lot of empty and unused city-centre property. On the same block on Eden Quay, there are several empty buildings. On the streets around both Liberty Hall on the north side,and Apollo House on the south, there appear to be as many vacant buildings as those that are in use. Large swathes of city centre Dublin still have the same broken, wasted look to them that they had twenty years ago, which might make you wonder what the Celtic Feline period was really all about anyway.
Isn't it amazing that Dublin has gone from complete over-development, with cranes on every corner, to a severe housing shortage in such a few short years ? And every time we walk down these streets, the concrete results of planning incompetence, political corruption, waste, and landlord neglect are still staring back at us vacantly through grimy, broken and boarded-up windows ? How is this even possible in a modern, affluent society that claims to be such a natural home for the world’s most advanced technological corporations ?
The suited people at BNP Paribas Real Estate are trying to rent Apollo House as offices, which range in size from 350-4000 square metres. It says ‘ Very Competitive Rental Terms’ on the sign outside, just above the Department of Social Welfare signs that haven’t been taken down, or cleaned, since it closed about ten years ago. BNP Paribas is the 3rd largest bank, and the 18th largest corporation, in the world.
The nice estate agent people at daft.ie are also aiding them in the process. http://media.daft.ie/property-image...
So, why doesn't the State that rented Apollo House for decades as Social Welfare offices not just re-rent it now as a Social Housing project ? It would probably be a lot cheaper long-term to convert buildings like this than to continue paying rent allowance-mortgage subsidy to a collection of smaller landlord investors; and these small landlords are the very people currently raising residential rents continuously. Converting buildings would also create much-needed, if temporary, employment. The people who would eventually live there might even be involved in working on the conversion ? Such schemes are more common in countries that don’t have the same level of dysfunctionality in their housing system as Ireland does. One such successful work-to-housing community in Britain featured recently on Channel 4’s Grand Designs. There are many such communities in Germany.
The terrible, simple fact, is that the Irish political establishment does not actually want to solve the housing crisis.
The Irish government is not realistically attempting to come up with proposals to solve the severe housing shortage, because the Irish state, in reality, is a protection mechanism for wealth and property interests. The same vested professional interests- bankers, developer landlords, solicitors and accountancy firms, estate agents - who reaped huge profits during the credit boom, are now being protected from the real consequences of a financial collapse that they themselves caused. NAMA is the necessary front, the legislative cover for this protection racket, and we can all tell where NAMA is heading to, because we’ve been there before; years of a highly expensive, lawyers feeding frenzy of a Tribunal, which will fail to come to any real conclusions or apportion any real responsibility.
In the meantime, we will still face a growing humanitarian emergency in housing provision.
The real problem is not a lack of buildings , or money, or labour, either ; it is the total lack of political will. There is absolutely no shortage of empty buildings, or of unemployed labour and skills. The problem is not lack of money, because the State can still afford to pay €8 billion per year in debt interest on private bank loans. €8 billion Euro would solve Ireland's housing problems immediately.
The problem is the system itself, Capitalism, the central principles of which are enshrined in the Irish Constitution: individuals, and business entities like banks, corporations, and hedge funds, are free to own and trade as much private property as they like, and for as much profit as possible, regardless of the social consequences. The results of this dysfunctional system, over just the last few years, are easy to see in Ireland - vast over-production leading to extreme waste, unemployment and emigration; then an extreme deficit, half a billion Euros on rent allowance annually, housing deprivation, and growing homelessness. How can anybody continue to pretend that the current system is in any way rational or sane ?
The banking and property crashes of 2008 were not a mystery, or an unforeseen natural disaster, they were the logical result of a private free-market in housing provision and de-regulated bank loans. The private sector model of housing provision, the one that imploded so spectacularly in 2008, leaving puke-trails of waste-ground and ghost estates behind it, is not just going through a temporary crisis, it is the crisis. It produces a fake boom and a disastrous bust in every single generation in Ireland, because that is exactly what it is designed to do. It also produces a wave of emigration in every generation; before 2008, there was 1982, before that it was the mid-50s, and the early 30s. Up to a third of each younger generation has left Ireland in each of those periods, roughly 26 years apart. Up to 250,000 of the current younger generation, the best educated in Irish history, have left since 2008. 26 also just happens to be the average age at which people begin to think about their long-term, life-long housing needs. Until we begin to see that these facts are intricately connected, we will be doomed to repeat them.
The Irish State, in it’s current form, will do as little as possible to curb housing demand, because where else can the excess demand that leads to vastly over-priced housing come from, if there is no deliberate creation of shortage and need ? The total run-down of the public housing system that occurred over the last 20-30 years WAS the deliberate creation of excess demand, and it was overseen in various combinations by the three major political parties at both Dáil and local council levels. Nobody else has ever had any political control in Ireland, so, between them, they alone are responsible. Their friends in the private sector will never provide adequate social housing, because to do so would be totally contrary to their only interests - profit and wealth accumulation.
A rational public housing system would permanently remove a sizable proportion of the population from the clutches of banks, developers and landlords. The mainstream political cronies of the business elite will not act against their donor’s interests, and in many cases their interests actually coincide; up to a quarter of TDs are landlords and property speculators themselves, and as many also have banking investments.
Sadly though, no amount of social justice lobbying, conferences, or sleep-outs and charity events, are going to solve the long-term problem of housing provision. Without protest politics on the streets, and maybe more importantly, the organised occupation of bank and NAMA properties all over Ireland, the Irish state will not concede to any great changes in the current system.
It is far from certain even that any new-ish type of government in Ireland can solve the crisis immediately either. Any hypothetical Left-oriented government will inevitably face huge resistance through the courts from powerful property interests if it as much as attempts to introduce rent controls, never mind compulsorily purchasing land to actually build the housing that is so urgently needed. Any such hypothetical future government is still going to need the support of a larger social movement outside the Dail.
Thankfully, the success of the anti-water charges movement in the last year provides a very recent example of what is possible when people start to get organised in their communities and workplaces.
In the water movement, a disparate bunch of community groups, trades unions and political parties, has managed to force the State’s hand on several occasions, and is now on the verge of a historic victory.
It might also be worthwhile remembering that apart from the Dublin Right 2 Water marches, the anti-water tax movement has been a campaign of asymmetric tactics and strategies. And it has worked.
Local groups in Cork and Dublin began spontaneously protesting against metering, months before registration with Irish Water was even an issue. Then the Left parties, People Before Profit, Anti-Austerity Alliance, Workers Party and Sinn Fein, drew community activists together in meetings and small protests at Councils and politician visits. Their elected representatives kept the issue alive in the Dail and the media. Communities continued to mobilise, networks grew, and social media allowed people to see what others were up to, to communicate and share ideas and tactics.
There was no central core of organisation of the water movement, but it has succeeded on it’s own terms anyway. People found their own level as agitators, educators or organisers, and just got on with it.
Over half of all households have still not paid any Irish Water Bills; so the boycott worked. Irish Water will be an important election issue for many people, and this is just further proof of the success of the movement.
The fact that many of the water movement’ s constituent parts have now widened their campaign to a more general anti-austerity agenda also bodes well for a movement on social housing rights. 50-100,000 people have marched in Dublin against water charges on five separate occasions in the last year. The local R2W marches last November was the largest nationwide protest since the movement against conscription during the First World War. This is the most sustained movement of social protest in the history of the Irish state.
There are almost 100,000 families on housing waiting lists, and tens of thousands more facing repossession hearings in the courts. A convergence of these two issues alone will create a powerful new social force on the Irish political landscape. And such convergences are already beginning to happen.
In recent days there have been reports of new alliances and electoral pacts between the political groups and unions in Right 2 Water, which itself has broadened, after a series of policy consultations, into a wider movement, Right 2 Change. http://www.right2change.ie/
People Before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance have come together to form one electoral bloc inside the Dail after the next election. PBP/AAA will stand 40 candidates in constituencies around the country. TDs have already been vocal and active on the housing issue. Ruth Coppinger TD (AAA), along with local homeless families, is currently involved in the occupation of a NAMA property in Ongar, near Blanchardstown in West Dublin. In a statement released yesterday she encouraged others to begin doing the same in their own areas.
And that is the simple reality of the fight for social housing in Ireland. Any movement to achieve housing rights is going to have to use crowbars and occupations as often as it now uses computers, petitions and marches. It will have to break unjust (and abstract) property laws in the interest of real (concrete) human needs.
Right2Housing, Housing Action Now, An Spreach Housing Action Committee, and several local groups of homeless families have recently been involved in occupying buildings and staging sit-ins at Council offices. Four Registrars courts around the country were also shut down last month by mortgage-repossession protesters, in Donegal, Mayo, Monaghan, and Mullingar, and the groups involved intend to return at next months session. Online supporters have also said they will attempt to do the same at other local Registrars sessions.
In some towns, such as Galway, the Registrars Court sits more than the usual once-a-month, such is the demand from bailed-out banks to repossess distressed properties.
Occupied and squatted communities are sprouting up spontaneously here and there, as younger and unemployed activists simply refuse the extortionate rents of the landlord/rent allowance circus and look after themselves. They are turning the pointless waste of the capitalist property system into viable, interesting communities.
All these initiatives and actions should be actively encouraged and supported by anyone who hopes to see a fair and equitable housing system in Ireland. Small victories, and examples of confident defiance are always good for morale.
Protest. Communicate. Mobilise.
Agitate. Educate. Organise.
There are buildings similar to Apollo House on many streets in Dublin, and in towns, villages and cities all over Ireland. At the same time, there are almost 100,000 families on social housing waiting lists, and tens of thousands more facing repossession hearings in the Registrar’s Courts. So, why is there absolutely no urgency in official Ireland to provide adequate social housing for the growing ranks of the working poor and under-employed ?
Alan Kelly, the Labour Party’s Minister for Homelessness, can see Apollo House, and other buildings like it, from his offices in the Custom House, just across the river; he probably passes it everyday on his way to and from work.
The upper stories of Apollo House can also be seen from the front door of SIPTU's Liberty Hall, where the 'Towards a Real Housing Strategy' conference took place yesterday. The day-long conference heard from housing activists, homeless families, social justice campaigners, politicians, and academics; a wide-range of ‘people centred’ solutions to housing need were discussed in smaller ‘workshop’ groups. http://www.right2change.ie/blog/tow... Various opinions and ideas throughout the day were reported on the facebook page of Housing Action Now https://www.facebook.com/HousingAct...
From the front of Liberty Hall you can see quite a lot of empty and unused city-centre property. On the same block on Eden Quay, there are several empty buildings. On the streets around both Liberty Hall on the north side,and Apollo House on the south, there appear to be as many vacant buildings as those that are in use. Large swathes of city centre Dublin still have the same broken, wasted look to them that they had twenty years ago, which might make you wonder what the Celtic Feline period was really all about anyway.
Isn't it amazing that Dublin has gone from complete over-development, with cranes on every corner, to a severe housing shortage in such a few short years ? And every time we walk down these streets, the concrete results of planning incompetence, political corruption, waste, and landlord neglect are still staring back at us vacantly through grimy, broken and boarded-up windows ? How is this even possible in a modern, affluent society that claims to be such a natural home for the world’s most advanced technological corporations ?
The suited people at BNP Paribas Real Estate are trying to rent Apollo House as offices, which range in size from 350-4000 square metres. It says ‘ Very Competitive Rental Terms’ on the sign outside, just above the Department of Social Welfare signs that haven’t been taken down, or cleaned, since it closed about ten years ago. BNP Paribas is the 3rd largest bank, and the 18th largest corporation, in the world.
The nice estate agent people at daft.ie are also aiding them in the process. http://media.daft.ie/property-image...
So, why doesn't the State that rented Apollo House for decades as Social Welfare offices not just re-rent it now as a Social Housing project ? It would probably be a lot cheaper long-term to convert buildings like this than to continue paying rent allowance-mortgage subsidy to a collection of smaller landlord investors; and these small landlords are the very people currently raising residential rents continuously. Converting buildings would also create much-needed, if temporary, employment. The people who would eventually live there might even be involved in working on the conversion ? Such schemes are more common in countries that don’t have the same level of dysfunctionality in their housing system as Ireland does. One such successful work-to-housing community in Britain featured recently on Channel 4’s Grand Designs. There are many such communities in Germany.
The terrible, simple fact, is that the Irish political establishment does not actually want to solve the housing crisis.
The Irish government is not realistically attempting to come up with proposals to solve the severe housing shortage, because the Irish state, in reality, is a protection mechanism for wealth and property interests. The same vested professional interests- bankers, developer landlords, solicitors and accountancy firms, estate agents - who reaped huge profits during the credit boom, are now being protected from the real consequences of a financial collapse that they themselves caused. NAMA is the necessary front, the legislative cover for this protection racket, and we can all tell where NAMA is heading to, because we’ve been there before; years of a highly expensive, lawyers feeding frenzy of a Tribunal, which will fail to come to any real conclusions or apportion any real responsibility.
In the meantime, we will still face a growing humanitarian emergency in housing provision.
The real problem is not a lack of buildings , or money, or labour, either ; it is the total lack of political will. There is absolutely no shortage of empty buildings, or of unemployed labour and skills. The problem is not lack of money, because the State can still afford to pay €8 billion per year in debt interest on private bank loans. €8 billion Euro would solve Ireland's housing problems immediately.
The problem is the system itself, Capitalism, the central principles of which are enshrined in the Irish Constitution: individuals, and business entities like banks, corporations, and hedge funds, are free to own and trade as much private property as they like, and for as much profit as possible, regardless of the social consequences. The results of this dysfunctional system, over just the last few years, are easy to see in Ireland - vast over-production leading to extreme waste, unemployment and emigration; then an extreme deficit, half a billion Euros on rent allowance annually, housing deprivation, and growing homelessness. How can anybody continue to pretend that the current system is in any way rational or sane ?
The banking and property crashes of 2008 were not a mystery, or an unforeseen natural disaster, they were the logical result of a private free-market in housing provision and de-regulated bank loans. The private sector model of housing provision, the one that imploded so spectacularly in 2008, leaving puke-trails of waste-ground and ghost estates behind it, is not just going through a temporary crisis, it is the crisis. It produces a fake boom and a disastrous bust in every single generation in Ireland, because that is exactly what it is designed to do. It also produces a wave of emigration in every generation; before 2008, there was 1982, before that it was the mid-50s, and the early 30s. Up to a third of each younger generation has left Ireland in each of those periods, roughly 26 years apart. Up to 250,000 of the current younger generation, the best educated in Irish history, have left since 2008. 26 also just happens to be the average age at which people begin to think about their long-term, life-long housing needs. Until we begin to see that these facts are intricately connected, we will be doomed to repeat them.
The Irish State, in it’s current form, will do as little as possible to curb housing demand, because where else can the excess demand that leads to vastly over-priced housing come from, if there is no deliberate creation of shortage and need ? The total run-down of the public housing system that occurred over the last 20-30 years WAS the deliberate creation of excess demand, and it was overseen in various combinations by the three major political parties at both Dáil and local council levels. Nobody else has ever had any political control in Ireland, so, between them, they alone are responsible. Their friends in the private sector will never provide adequate social housing, because to do so would be totally contrary to their only interests - profit and wealth accumulation.
A rational public housing system would permanently remove a sizable proportion of the population from the clutches of banks, developers and landlords. The mainstream political cronies of the business elite will not act against their donor’s interests, and in many cases their interests actually coincide; up to a quarter of TDs are landlords and property speculators themselves, and as many also have banking investments.
Sadly though, no amount of social justice lobbying, conferences, or sleep-outs and charity events, are going to solve the long-term problem of housing provision. Without protest politics on the streets, and maybe more importantly, the organised occupation of bank and NAMA properties all over Ireland, the Irish state will not concede to any great changes in the current system.
It is far from certain even that any new-ish type of government in Ireland can solve the crisis immediately either. Any hypothetical Left-oriented government will inevitably face huge resistance through the courts from powerful property interests if it as much as attempts to introduce rent controls, never mind compulsorily purchasing land to actually build the housing that is so urgently needed. Any such hypothetical future government is still going to need the support of a larger social movement outside the Dail.
Thankfully, the success of the anti-water charges movement in the last year provides a very recent example of what is possible when people start to get organised in their communities and workplaces.
In the water movement, a disparate bunch of community groups, trades unions and political parties, has managed to force the State’s hand on several occasions, and is now on the verge of a historic victory.
It might also be worthwhile remembering that apart from the Dublin Right 2 Water marches, the anti-water tax movement has been a campaign of asymmetric tactics and strategies. And it has worked.
Local groups in Cork and Dublin began spontaneously protesting against metering, months before registration with Irish Water was even an issue. Then the Left parties, People Before Profit, Anti-Austerity Alliance, Workers Party and Sinn Fein, drew community activists together in meetings and small protests at Councils and politician visits. Their elected representatives kept the issue alive in the Dail and the media. Communities continued to mobilise, networks grew, and social media allowed people to see what others were up to, to communicate and share ideas and tactics.
There was no central core of organisation of the water movement, but it has succeeded on it’s own terms anyway. People found their own level as agitators, educators or organisers, and just got on with it.
Over half of all households have still not paid any Irish Water Bills; so the boycott worked. Irish Water will be an important election issue for many people, and this is just further proof of the success of the movement.
The fact that many of the water movement’ s constituent parts have now widened their campaign to a more general anti-austerity agenda also bodes well for a movement on social housing rights. 50-100,000 people have marched in Dublin against water charges on five separate occasions in the last year. The local R2W marches last November was the largest nationwide protest since the movement against conscription during the First World War. This is the most sustained movement of social protest in the history of the Irish state.
There are almost 100,000 families on housing waiting lists, and tens of thousands more facing repossession hearings in the courts. A convergence of these two issues alone will create a powerful new social force on the Irish political landscape. And such convergences are already beginning to happen.
In recent days there have been reports of new alliances and electoral pacts between the political groups and unions in Right 2 Water, which itself has broadened, after a series of policy consultations, into a wider movement, Right 2 Change. http://www.right2change.ie/
People Before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance have come together to form one electoral bloc inside the Dail after the next election. PBP/AAA will stand 40 candidates in constituencies around the country. TDs have already been vocal and active on the housing issue. Ruth Coppinger TD (AAA), along with local homeless families, is currently involved in the occupation of a NAMA property in Ongar, near Blanchardstown in West Dublin. In a statement released yesterday she encouraged others to begin doing the same in their own areas.
And that is the simple reality of the fight for social housing in Ireland. Any movement to achieve housing rights is going to have to use crowbars and occupations as often as it now uses computers, petitions and marches. It will have to break unjust (and abstract) property laws in the interest of real (concrete) human needs.
Right2Housing, Housing Action Now, An Spreach Housing Action Committee, and several local groups of homeless families have recently been involved in occupying buildings and staging sit-ins at Council offices. Four Registrars courts around the country were also shut down last month by mortgage-repossession protesters, in Donegal, Mayo, Monaghan, and Mullingar, and the groups involved intend to return at next months session. Online supporters have also said they will attempt to do the same at other local Registrars sessions.
In some towns, such as Galway, the Registrars Court sits more than the usual once-a-month, such is the demand from bailed-out banks to repossess distressed properties.
Occupied and squatted communities are sprouting up spontaneously here and there, as younger and unemployed activists simply refuse the extortionate rents of the landlord/rent allowance circus and look after themselves. They are turning the pointless waste of the capitalist property system into viable, interesting communities.
All these initiatives and actions should be actively encouraged and supported by anyone who hopes to see a fair and equitable housing system in Ireland. Small victories, and examples of confident defiance are always good for morale.
Protest. Communicate. Mobilise.
Agitate. Educate. Organise.
Co-archived Sean Breathnach