Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 4 mins.)
Late Tuesday night and early hours of Wednesday morning an operation with large numbers of Gardaí and their helicopter circling overhead disturbed residents in the north Dublin city centre area of Berkeley Road and surroundings.
It looked like drug bust, hostage rescue situation or siege, but it was none of those things, instead being an eviction of four housing activists.1
The building had been “acquisitioned” by the Revolutionary Housing League which for a couple of years has been occupying buildings lying empty around Dublin in order to house homeless people and to inspire people to take over empty buildings to end the homeless crisis.
One of those buildings was the red-brick building on Eden Quay and corner of Marlborough Street; it had been operated by the Salvation Army as a night shelter for homeless young people but left empty for years after losing funding.
On 1st May 2022, RHL2 activists ‘acquisitioned’ the building, renamed it James Connolly House and repaired a leak in the roof. In the early morning of 9th June 2022, an estimated 100 Gardaí (some reportedly armed) stormed the building with a Garda helicopter circling overhead.
Two RHL activists performing overnight security on the building were arrested and brought to court, where they declined to be bound over or to give an undertaking that they would not return to the building.
The Salvation Army said that they were renovating the building in order to house Ukrainian refugees. Not only was there no evidence of that in the building when it was occupied but it is empty still, over a year after that eviction3.
Garda evictions have taken place around other acquisitions of empty properties and RHL activists have on each occasion refused to commit to an undertaking not to occupy other properties.
Rather, the RHL has called for empty buildings to be occupied around the country.
The eviction this week
After the eviction in Berkeley Road, four RHL activists were taken to Court where they followed the previous pattern of refusing to be bound over or to promise not to occupy other buildings. Nevertheless they were released with a threat of jail-time if they re-occupied.
The lessee of the building, advertising as Cabhrú and formerly Catholic Housing Aid Society (Chas), has faced allegations of improper use of that building and another, Fr. Scully House on nearby Gardiner Street, some of which were borne out in an investigation by Charities Regulator.4
The housing crisis
The numbers of homeless people in the the Irish state passed 12,000 for the first time in May this year and over 4,000 of those are children,5 nor do those figures include people defaulting on their mortgage loans, sleeping on the street or ‘sofa-surfing’ with friends and relations.
According to figures published in April this year, there are over 100,000 empty homes within the Irish state, not counting holiday homes (the Berkeley Road one was empty for three years).
Housing the homeless on the face of it can be accomplished without the revolutionary overthrow of the State and its Gombeen6 ruling class. All that is necessary is a public housing program financed by the State, which it could easily accomplish.
However, the stubborn clinging of the Gombeens to keeping a wide high-return market for property speculators, bank funders and big landlords, year after year as the housing crisis worsens, seems to indicate that a revolutionary remedy is necessary.
This week the Taoiseach,7 Varadkar, inferred that a contributory cause of the housing crisis was that homeless people had turned down alternative accommodation, a nonsensical claim since one person’s declined accommodation could just be offered to the next.
Addressing him in the Leinster House parliament, Sinn Féin TD8 Pearse Doherty9 took him to task for inferring that the homeless were to blame for their situation, in response to which Varadkar denied accusing the homeless and ungraciously amended his statement to “some homeless people”.
He went on to say that homelessness has a number of causes but neglected to name the principal one, viz. that the State does not supply funds to municipal authorities to provide public housing, leaving property speculators, banks and big landlords free to exploit the housing ‘scarcity’.
According to media reports, Doherty neglected to take this opportunity to point out the real cause of the problem and the solution, which confirms the doubts of those who say that his party is “Fianna Fáil Mark II”,10 with no intention to fundamentally alter the economic system in the state.11
In conclusion
The housing crisis shows no sign of being resolved and the ruling class have ridden high-profile ‘shaming’ token occupations such as that of Apollo House in January 2017 without changing anything. RHL occupations do seem to show a way forward if they are widely emulated.
Heavy Garda operations on the one hand and comparatively light treatment by the courts on the other seems to indicate a determination not to tolerate this kind of direct action on homelessness while at the same time moderated by a fear of creating housing action martyrs.
Meanwhile the numbers of homeless grows by the month without any other credible solution in sight.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1This is the police force that has been described by its chief, Commissioner Drew Harris (formerly Asst. Commissioner of the colonial gendarmerie PSNI and therefore also MI5), as his “gang” but which seems unable to prevent serious assaults in the city centre, even in its main street.
2Originally Revolutionary Housing Union, later became RHL.
3And over 30 months after it first became empty.
4Some of those included a friend of the charity’s Chief Exeutive being accommodated in the building allegedly providing only for the elderly, rooms being let to short-stay students without proper guarantees or rights and one of the houses being used as a business address.
5https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/politics/homelessness-figures-april-2023-12000-30085446
6From the Irish “gaimbín”, describing opportunist middlemen, now applied to the foreign-dependent native Irish capitalist class.
7Prime Minister of the Irish state.
8Teachta Dála, member of the Irish Parliament, equivalent to “MP”.
9Deputy leader of the party in the Irish parliament. Holly Cairns, leader of the Social Democrats also attacked Varadkar on the statement.
10Fianna Fáil is one of the two main government parties; originally a split from Sinn Féin led by De Valera, it has been in government more than any other party in the Irish state.
11A number of SF party leaders including its current president have publicly stated that big business has nothing to fear from their party.
SOURCES
Charities Regulator report: https://www.charitiesregulator.ie/en/information-for-the-public/our-news/2021/july/charities-regulator-publishes-inspectors-report-into-the-affairs-of-cabhru-housing-association-services
Irish Times articles regarding concerns over the years: https://www.irishtimes.com/tags/cabhru-housing-association/
Video about the RHL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSL453gVHAg
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/politics/homelessness-figures-april-2023-12000-30085446
Taoiseach Varadkar and his controversial remark about the homeless: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/taoiseach-refuses-to-apologise-for-saying-plenty-of-people-on-housing-list-refuse-offers-of-accommodation/a1546284704.html
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