Sometimes the most powerful messages are not to be found where you would expect. Take a look on Google Maps at O’Devaney Gardens in Dublin 7. You can see the contentious new housing development being built by a private developer on the site of the 1950s council flats scheme. Look a little closer — as one local resident, freelance arts manager Lian Bell, did — at where the last blocks of flats stood before being demolished. The ground is screaming. “The flats will still belong to the people,” one message reads. “You took our homes,” another roars from the concrete.
Housing activism is happening, but perhaps not in the clear-cut way that people envision movement-building taking place. For now, it’s a growing but disparate movement. Yet in politics, in activist circles, and literally on the streets, signs of protest are growing. Who are the main “influencers” in this realm?
The biggest party-political influencers in housing are Eoin Ó Broin, Paul Murphy, Rebecca Moynihan and Cian O’Callaghan. Sinn Féin’s Ó Broin is obviously the minister for housing in waiting, with a picture of the French modernist architect Le Corbusier’s 1950 housing project Unité d’Habitation as his pandemic-era Zoom background, and three books written on housing and architecture. If Fine Gael’s approach to housing represents a neoliberal failure, then his offers a seismic reboot, prioritising public housing building, cutting rents and addressing the distortion that a failed market-led approach has caused.
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Vulture funds and institutional investors are sucking up housing supply and competing against not just individual buyers, but smaller private landlords. Practical? Who knows. But the current situation certainly is not. The fact that there are landlords within his party — including Johnny Guirke, who recently has been in hot water over his failure to register a rental property with the Residential Tenancies Board — and that Sinn Féin itself is a property-rich entity, will have to be addressed for trust to be built with the public on Sinn Féin’s housing policies. But the reality is, when you’re popular, the electorate allows you a longer leash.
The issue is large, with so many moving parts, but it is obvious that a referendum on the right to housing may be something through which eclectic housing activism could be channelled
The rhetoric of People Before Profit TD Murphy is resonating right now. The narrative of landlord elites causing and capitalising on the suffering of renters, people on housing lists, and the record numbers who have been made homeless, is essentially writing itself. Every controversy that emerges involving a Government politician’s landlordism amplifies his message.
As a party, Labour often struggles to get its messaging on housing to land where it wants it to, but Moynihan is a consistent voice, particularly on amenities and corporate gentrification in Dublin city. Her position, that a right to housing needs to be constitutionally equal to the right to private property, is a campaign-focused approach. The issue is large, with so many moving parts, but it is obvious that a referendum on the right to housing — however effective in real terms — may be something through which eclectic housing activism could be channelled.
O’Callaghan’s position — that the Government is too close to those profiting from the housing crisis to take the necessary steps to fix it — is an obvious one that exemplifies the Social Democrats’ stance. What they lack in media coverage, they gain in clarity and pragmatism.
On Sunday, the Community Action Tenants Union launched its national campaigns. At its agm last April, the union endorsed two approaches. The first is around organising existing public housing tenants and fighting for more public housing. The second is opposing profit-led developments of luxury apartments, co-living schemes and hotels. These campaigns include canvassing, stalls and meetings, mapping sites of interest, and direct action including protest and pickets. Many of the organisation’s branches are Dublin-based, but it also has branches in Belfast, Galway, Cork and Maynooth. The union encompasses tenants in the private rental market, mortgage holders, council tenants, and those living in precarious or emergency accommodation.
There are more campaigns emerging all the time. The Revolutionary Housing League’s actions have been under-reported. This group has been occupying buildings and sites, most recently a site at Parkgate House beside Heuston Station in Dublin, renaming it Ionad Seán Heuston. Some may find this approach alarming but it’s happening. Last week, the group’s fundraiser for €3,000 met its goal within hours.
In alternative media, website The Ditch has lit fires under Government on the Robert Troy scandal, and on the multitude of issues within An Bord Pleanála. Online, some of the biggest influencers include Crazy House Prices, a platform run by Ciarán Mulqueen. Crazy House Prices has more than 110,000 followers across Instagram and Twitter, a podcast, and more than 450 supporters on Patreon. Last week, I noticed a new platform, The Estate of Us, with a facility for people to contact their TDs.
One commentator who will continue to have impact this autumn is Maynooth lecturer Dr Rory Hearne, whose book Gaffs: Why No One Can Get A House and What We Can Do About It is published this month. There’s also the Cost of Living Coalition, which is holding a pre-budget protest in Dublin on September 24th. And increasingly, journalists themselves — especially younger journalists experiencing the housing crisis — are becoming more opinionated on the issue. While many bemoan the lack of mobilisation in mass protest, things are building — at least faster than houses themselves.