Ireland needs return to mass mobilisation to bring change to housing system

Popular and well-organised movements in the past forced successive governments to take steps to meet the country’s housing needs

Community Action Tenants Union Ireland (CATU) supporters demonstrating against the lifting the eviction ban at The Spire, Dublin. Picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

The late-19th century Land War, which involved mass nonpayment of rent by tenant farmers, led to the breaking up and redistribution of estates held by the Anglo-Irish ruling class and to the mass construction of labourers’ cottages throughout rural Ireland. As a result, by the beginning of the 20th century, Ireland had more public housing than anywhere else in the UK.

In the late 1960s, the Dublin Housing Action Committee and other groups around the country waged militant campaigns for better housing involving occupations, squatting and eviction resistance.