Workers Solidarity Movement

We spent the day of the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising on the streets of Dublin recording the various peoples commemorative events. This was the actual anniversary on 24th April rather than the religious nationalist and state favoured date of the Easter weekend a month back.

In a lot of ways this seperation was a very good thing as the state commemorations with its parades of soldiers and sealed off areas for dignitaries behind which hated politicians laid wreaths had little positive to be said about it.

The photo shows stickering by anti-racists/anti-fascists on Nutgrove Way, Rathfarnham, where the vicious racist attack on 3 migrants by 5 men happened on the evening of Thursday, 5th May. All 3 – originally from Afghanistan - went to hospital for their injuries. The 18 and 20-year-old brothers were beaten unconscious (some of the assailants using a blunt metal weapon), and their 13-year-old nephew was punched in the face.

'“They rolled down the window and started shouting the F-word many times, swearing a lot and saying, ‘Why are you here? Go back to your country,’” [the boy's father] said.'

On May 9th there was a protest against the giveaway of public land to private interests, outside Dublin City Hall.  As part of the "Housing Land Initiative" Dublin City Council is threating to hand land across Dublin - in O'Devaney Garden, St Michael's Estate and Oscar Traynor Road - over to private developers.

Activists are calling on Dublin City Councillors to:
1. Halt the Housing Land Initiative
2. In St Michael's estate and O'Devaney Gardens, ensure regeneration committee are re-established and consulted prior to all decisions,
3. In O'Devaney Gardens, build homes on-site for remaining residents before making remaining residents leave their current homes
4. Use all three sites to build cross-subsidised public housing that's accessible to all income groups evenly, with those who earn more paying higher rent.

Huge numbers of people are now effectively homeless as they are unable to find somewhere stable to rent. Fortunately only a minority have been forced onto the streets so far, Dublin's hotels are full of families on 3 day rotation emergency accommodation. In some hotels such families are not allowed to use the front entrance. Thousands of others are forced to move into already overcrowded accommodation, perhaps with parents or friends. Yet more are coach surfing, moving around as they exhaust the charity of friends. And a growing number are sleeping on the streets or in tents, van and cars in park and industrial estates.

Our solidarity to Cadburys workers who today begin an indefinite strike at the Coolock plant against the outsourcing of jobs.  The company is trying to destroy 17 properly paid and pensionable jobs to replace them with minimum wage ones.

27 Feb at the Ha’penny bridge, as part of a European-wide day of protest, a crowd gathered to make a public display of resistance against the closed borders and direct provision policies of Ireland. The people refuse to silently tolerate the way mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who find themselves attempting to escape war and/or poverty are treated by and in our comparatively affluent society.

The families who were being housed in an emergency accommodation facility on 54-55 Mountjoy street and were to be evicted today have been fighting back. Yesterday afternoon they occupied the DCC offices, demanding that officals talk to them collectively.  And this morning they occupied the buidling they are being evicted from, hanging banners from the upper floor as a solidarity protest took place below.

Over the last week the massive abandoned Grangegorman complex has been reoccupied by squatters including many of those who were eviced last year.  As our video shows after the High Court injunction last year the owners who took posession did nothing to bring this huge area back into use for housing.  The sole interest seems to have been in selling it, recently it was sold and when the new owners didn't bother with the 24 hour security on site it was reoccupied.

Some 30 people had been living in the various buildings that make up the Grangegorman complex prior to the High Court injunction.  The injunction ment that those 30 all had to try and find alternative accommodation as a time when the housing crisis in Dublin has deepened and rents have soared above levels affordable even to someone earning two times the minimum wage.

On the 18th of February, 13 families who were being housed in an emergency accommodation facility on 54-55 Mountjoy street were handed an eviction notice, ending their tenancy in just 8 days time.

The stated reason for the eviction was an increase in the property’s rent, which DCC claim they will be unable to supply. As the residents are in emergency accommodation, they do not receive protection under the tenants’ rights law.