The Take Back the City housing group – which includes members of Take Back Trinity – has occupied a building on Belvedere Place as part of its ongoing protest at Dublin’s accommodation crisis.
The property is the third to have been occupied by housing activists in the last month, since they first occupied a building in Summerhill Parade on August 7th. The protestors left Summerhill Parade on August 16th after an eviction notice was issued by the owners of the vacant property. They later occupied a building on North Frederick St, an occupation now in its 22nd day despite a High Court injunction ordering the protestors to leave the building.
Speaking to The University Times on the day that the injunction was issued, Oisín Vince Coulter, the President of the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) and a leader in Take Back Trinity, said: “We’re making the political point that these properties shouldn’t be used for profit, they shouldn’t be turned into guest houses as the injunction said it should be, given that there’s like close on 50 hotels already being developed right now in the inner city while essentially no social housing of any meaningful amount is being built for years. These properties need to be compulsory purchased and turned into social housing immediately.”
“Will we be there in six hours? Will we be there in six weeks? We actually don’t know but we’re planning to be there indefinitely”, Coulter said.
This morning, a post on the group’s Facebook page said: “This is an expansion rather than a move from one property to another, as activists are continuing to occupy 34 North Frederick Street – despite the High Court injunction issued against them.”
“Property hoarding in any context is completely unacceptable – but in the midst of an unprecedented crisis in housing, it is downright tasteless”, the post said.
On Thursday, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) announced it would be joining the march for housing, instead of organising its annual pre-budget march for education. Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU), the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) and Take Back Trinity also pledged their support to the Raise the Roof march, which will take place on October 3rd.
Speaking to The University Times at the launch of the campaign, TCDSU President Shane De Rís said: “There is a genuine thirst for tangible action on the housing crisis. Enough is enough. Students have been suffering for far too long. We’ve been priced out of our education, priced out of our futures and we will be really really pushing this to make sure that student see the effect of this, not just on students but on society as a whole.”
The launch of the campaign coincided with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s insistence on Thursday that this year’s budget will not just be about housing. “Big budget announcements”, Varadkar said, will not fix the housing crisis.
“The budget has to be about pensions and welfare, it has to be about health, it has to be about housing, it has to be about education, it has to be about infrastructure, it has to be about climate change, it has to be about the tax burden that a lot of middle income families bear, it has to be about childcare”, he said.
Varadkar said that he can “understand why people are sceptical but if there was a quick-fix solution to this problem I think other people or other parties would have put that forward by now – would have published it, would have defended it, would have brought it through the Dáil, for example. We don’t have a majority in the Dáil, the opposition does. The truth is there is no quick fix. I think the vast majority of people do understand that”.
Take Back Trinity was set up in March in protest at the introduction of supplemental exam fees. The group previously occupied the Dining Hall in Trinity for almost three days and organised several protests, rallies and concerts around campus. Over the summer, the group expanded its remit, attending Dublin’s first-ever Trans Pride and partaking in the Summerhill occupation.
