“As a Socialist I am prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for our motherland her rightful heritage – independence; but if you ask me to abate one jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to conciliate the privileged classes, then I must decline.” James Connolly, Socialism and Nationalism
For over fifty years now, the 26 county state has been scaling back its direct responsibility of delivering housing to the people. The amount directly built by state or local authorities has gone from an average of 1:15 in favour of private to 1:100 in favour of private. This, alongside other measures that helped inflate the cost of housing in respect to wages created a ticking time bomb that we are now calling the housing crisis.
The housing crisis is not just the visible things we see and hear about in the papers, on social media and within our own families. It is all the subsidiary things that we don’t see. It is the thousands of people couchsurfing who aren’t considered homeless. It’s those who have to other shores as part of the tragically unfortunate custom of emigration. It’s those who have taken their own lives because of the stresses of losing their homes. It is those who are sleeping in the hubs, in the hostels and on the streets. It is those who have turned to substance abuse. It is those who have no community and lost their community. It is for everybody who is stuck living with their parents and who has several generations in the one home. It is for us all an on-going trauma.
This ‘system’ that creates this trauma is created by Irish men and women. It is staffed, replicated and continued by Irish men and women. Some of these people directly benefit from it because they own multiple homes or are renting to the state directly or benefiting from someone else renting to it. Some of the council staff in the local authorities also own multiple homes and avail of the generous state schemes.
The pressures of all these experiences, these contradictions, the stresses, the fights, the fragmentation of communities have created a never ending boiling like pressure among our class. Anger, cynicism and frustration are the feelings expressed towards many of the mainstream methods of changing things. Petitions, emails, peaceful protests all seem to be ineffectual as the crisis for us in housing intensifies.
At the same time, the state, duly fulfilling its obligations to the partnerships it has signed up to in the EU, opens the door to Ukrainian people fleeing the war. It is able to use money to pay hotels and other centers to house Ukrainians. In this way, the state doesn’t invest in any permanent infrastructure but wholescale rents the hospitality sector. Shortly after that, another wave of refugees starts to arrive. Many of them are not white nor coming from a conflict that is in the interests of arms companies or NATO. Many of them are not Christian.
The Irish direct provision system will treat the non-white refugees differently. They will be given less money, less rights and less support. They’re not unequal, they just have an unequal legal status, say the Green Party.
Along come the troubadours of justice, whose answers to these complex and highly emotional societal problems generated by the housing crisis is to blame some of the foreigners, particularly the dark skinned ones. Out comes all the frustration and the anger, pouring forward and cascading down the streets of Irish cities. Angry at being neglected, underfunded, ignored and disrespected, people from country towns and from the inner city turn out to protest what they have been misdirected to protest.
All that anger, the spontaneity of our class, becomes totally misdirected and away from the cause of the housing crisis in Ireland, and towards communities of people that flee the crises of their own countries. The housing crisis creates pressures that ensure sub-divisions in our communities. The crisis objectively benefits the establishment political parties, while their useful idiots in the far right play deftly into it by scapegoating migrants and not finance capital.
Extracting all these subsidiary issues that stem from the housing crisis and identifying their root is the theoretical task set out for communists. The practical work in conjunction with the theoretical is being active members of our tenants union (CATU) that mobilises people against the evictions and injustices of landlordism in Ireland.