The Housing Crisis in Ireland: Is Collective Action The Best Next Move?

We are in the middle of a major housing crisis in Ireland. Young people, in particular, are finding it almost impossible to buy houses or to secure a place to live. There aren’t enough homes on the market. Prices are too high. And, besides, getting a mortgage has been turned into the equivalent of jumping Beecher’s Brook in the Grand National. Without the aid of a horse…

As a result, people who really want to put down roots are forced to rent flats, apartments and houses. And guess what? The situation here is even worse. Accommodation is in short supply. Rents have skyrocketed to the extent that a lot of young people are paying an extortionate percentage of their total income on just having a roof over their heads. The balance of power in Irish housing is heavily skewed in favour of landlords. You have to ask: why is this so?

Here’s one possible answer. One in five TDs is a landlord. Is it any surprise, then, that housing Minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil recently announced legislation that would allow landlords to combine annual rent-cap increases if they haven’t upped the rent in previous years. On the flip side, despite hundreds of complaints to the Rent Tribunals Board over breaches of the permitted increases in so called ‘rent pressure zones’, only a fraction have resulted in sanctions.

Is there anything that can be done to shift the balance? Waiting around for the supply shortages to sort themselves out is hardly the answer, given that this will take a number of years at least. Which is why a bunch of activists decided to form The Community Action Tenants Union.

“Tenants,” explains Mitch Hamilton, a writer and game designer who is national communications officer for CATU, “have very little recourse under the law with which to get landlords punished or regulated if something goes wrong, or if they don’t follow their instructions or break contracts.”

So a different approach was needed.

“That’s why we decided to adopt the model of collective bargaining,” Mitch adds, “which is the same power you would use in a workplace union, when you have an issue. So rather than going one-on-one to address an issue with this person who has so much more power over you, you have a full union of over 1,000 members backing you up offering support and solidarity.”

BREACHING THE CONTRACT

The Community Action Tenants Union was formed in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit. In barely two years, they have amassed 1,506 members, across nearly 20 branches in Dublin, Belfast, Maynooth, Galway, Dún Laoghaire and Cork. The organisation is member-funded and member-led, with each branch setting their own goals and agendas.

“CATU is deliberately decentralised,” Mitch says. “We have a National Committee, but it’s not a supranational instruction group. Every branch has its own agendas, and pursues their own campaigns, with the understanding that should they wish for national support, they can reach out and have those national members come in.”

CATU’s work can take many forms. They will write to a landlord on a member’s behalf. Or actively show up to prevent a member being forcibly evicted. The latter are referred to as ‘member defence cases’.

When CATU get a call for help, the first step is to understand the issue and what resolution the member wants. While they have had several, well publicised incidents where they’ve had to take immediate action to prevent an illegal eviction, some members may simply want formal acknowledgment from the landlord that they were in the wrong, in cases of attempted rent hikes, or the return of withheld deposits.

“We’ve had some success in the past with overturning withheld deposits,” Mitch confirms, “especially from companies going through letting agencies. Active protest can take the form of targeted campaigns against their social media or protest outside their businesses. It’s about making them know that they can’t ignore us.”

Is there an example?

“We had one recent case of a withheld deposit,” he explains, “with a letting agency who were ignoring our calls and doing their best to pretend they weren’t hearing us. Some members applied for a viewing that they knew this letting agency was handling, and when the agent arrived for the viewing, instead was confronted with CATU members wanting to talk about the situation they were trying to ignore.”

While this might sound like a form of harassment, Mitch is careful to explain that CATU has templates that they follow when engaging in what he terms ‘escalations’ of that kind.

“Something like a ‘harassment’ campaign would never be our first recourse,” he says. “Our first step in any action, always, is to write to the landlord directly outlining precisely what needs to be addressed.

“It’s never a personal attack. We are very careful in all these campaigns to make sure that the focus is on what the landlord has done that is breaching the contract or the rules of the law.”

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LEVELS OF DERELICTION

Oisín Dolan, a Parliamentary Assistant with Sinn Féin, has been a member of three different CATU branches in Dublin city within the last 18 months. It highlights just how precarious renting in the capital has become.
He helped to found the Inchicore branch in April 2020. He then moved to a shared house in The Liberties. In September this year, one of his housemates informed the landlord she would be moving out.

“The landlord then decided,” Oisín says, “right, ‘you can all go with her’. The obvious reason – which he basically admitted to me – was so they can put it back on the market as quickly as possible and get the rent up.”

Technically, if the housemate who decided to move out was the name on the rental agreement, the landlord might have been within his rights. Either way, Oisín insists that they were given no reason for the eviction which the landlord initiated.

“They sent me an email,” Oisín recounts, “alluding to the idea that they were going to come through the door, if I didn’t get out in a week. Now, if I didn’t know my stuff, that would have been very, very intimidating. Even so it wasn’t nice.

“I knew that I had CATU to back me up as well. But I had a few sleepless nights, wondering, whether somebody was going to come through the door, and whether or not they’d send heavies in, because I’ve seen it happen on other people’s evictions.”

Evictions are clearly a big issue. If you are successfully turfed out, where are you going to go? The option of another, even more expensive place is hardly a runner. Besides which, increasingly, landlords are looking for references. So where does an eviction leave you? It was with scenarios of this kind in mind that, in late November, a coalition of CATU branches in North Dublin City launched their ‘No Evictions’ campaign. The campaign is in direct response to the ‘high incidence of violent evictions in this area’. CATU describe this as a humanitarian crisis. They have a point.

“CATU believes in direct action, which is basically taking the fight directly to the source of eviction,” Jess Bernard, the Member Defence Officer of the Phibsboro/Glasnevin branch, explained.

“The plan is to put financial and social pressure on landlords, so that they have difficulty operating their business – because they shouldn’t be able to profit off violent evictions. They shouldn’t be able to profit off dereliction.”

Squatting is also something that some branches of CATU are exploring, as a potential tool to highlight the levels of dereliction around the country.

“It’s an effective method,” Jess – who works with a tourism tech start-up TripAdmit and volunteers with the Small Trans Library and the Trans Writers Union – says, “because it highlights just how much housing stock in this country is left to rot by the owners.”

BANDING TOGETHER

Ultimately CATU are pushing for systemic change in relation to housing in Ireland.

“Saying, ‘We want changes X, Y and Z ten years down the line’ doesn’t solve anything for someone who is being thrown out on the kerb tomorrow,” Jess says. “Obviously, we have changes we’d like to see: the restoration of green spaces and community spaces; an approach to housing policy that focuses on affordable public housing; housing for the common good, as opposed to housing for profits; and, by extension, a restructuring of our approach to wealth in this country, ideally, so that people are paying their fair share. For us, the focus is that for every long-term housing goal, there’s someone around the corner who has a short-term housing need that we are there to help address.”

Ireland has, over the past 10 years, had great successes in affecting real change with grassroots, community-led campaigns, like the Marriage Equality and Repeal The Eighth campaigns. For Jess, collective action from groups like CATU might offer a similar solution to the housing crisis.

“It’s going to be normal people coming together to fight this,” she says, “on the grounds that we’re the ones that it affects. It’s gonna take a lot of work, but I think there’s real strength in everybody banding together to say: ‘We won’t stand for this anymore’.”

One thing is for sure: something has got to change in 2022. This might just be the start of it.

For more information or to join the Community Action Tenant's Union, visit catuireland.org.