Kilkenny Says No to the Privatisation of Social Housing
Stephen Delaney
The city of Kilkenny was the setting for a small but important protest on Saturday gone, where the issue of social housing privatisation was brought to the fore by a small group of activists from mixed backgrounds, Nationalist, Republican and Socialist and a handful of concerned locals. The aim of the protest was to demonstrate the possibility of cooperation on social issues between dedicated activists on issue A or B, once the messaging is right and good will is fostered towards a common goal. Between 15 and 20 attendees and marchers carried a large banner reading the words “Defend Public Housing, House the Irish”. The issue of social housing, which we should really be referring to as public housing, is one that has gone tragically underserved by the two dominant forces of activism in Ireland today. The anti-immigration and Palestinian self-determination movements have consumed the energy wells of what we have all come to call Right and Left politics, which has in effect neutralised the working class’s ability to take action on any other issue and has also allowed for the establishment/NGO class and this new MAGA-centric internationalism to grab the reins of both camps and use them against each other. This has allowed for a monster to grow unopposed underneath the surface of the housing crisis that requires pragmatic initiative from those willing to shift away from last summer’s theatrics of endless Palestine and migration protests, which bizarrely were pitted against each other by the powers that be. Saturday’s protest was an attempt to get the activist class to think beyond last summer and grow from it by looking at the housing issue as a unifying force for working class activism.
Some context briefly behind the motivation for this protest is needed. The Approved Housing Body Complex, a network of hundreds of private entities, most of which are registered as charities, has burrowed its way into the local council chambers using a purpose built menu of grants and schemes to acquire, renovate and bring to market social housing units that the local authorities then allocate to people on their housing lists. Some of these housing bodies openly admit the level of entrenchment on their websites with Clúid Housing, one of the larger of these bodies stating the following:
“The quantity of houses Clúid has available will usually be small in relation to the number of houses provided by the local authority. This is because local authorities have about 5 times as many properties as housing associations. However, housing associations are now the main providers of new social housing across the country. Clúid and other housing associations are working very hard to deliver as much good quality affordable housing as they can for people on housing waiting lists.”[1]
The above information confirms that social housing provision is shifting at a rapid pace from public to private. No sincere champion of the left would or should go missing on this issue. Clúid and the layers of companies behind them is a murky pond of investment capital that leads all the way back to BlackRock and Co. I imagine they are not alone in this either and the rest of this sewer of charities and fronts needs to be dissected by far more capable people than I, but for now let me draw the reader’s attention to a key issue, one that is inflaming the immigration debate and in my opinion rightfully so. Housing allocation. On the very same webpage I have linked above, Clúid also makes the astonishing admission that these housing bodies actively negotiate with/lobby the local authorities during the selection process for who gets a house in Ireland.
“If an applicant is forwarded by the local authority, Clúid will ring or write to you about the vacancy. If you are interested in it Clúid will invite you for an interview. Clúid then decides in conjunction with the local authority which applicants will receive an offer of housing.”[2]
The private investment class and the corporate business model that goes with it is now already at the stage where they are involved in not just the provision, but the allocation process. This is already enough information to fundamentally reject this and build a water-charges-esque movement to stop it, however the real aggravating factor regarding immigration can be found within the allocation process. DePaul Housing, an offshoot of St. Vincent De Paul network of charities, recently admitted to Gript Media that 70% of its housing allocation went to people who were residents of IPAS centres[3]. This information is now public knowledge and no matter how much the liberal left wants to put that genie back in the bottle, it is not happening. There is a legitimate native grievance here that should be addressed by the Left rather than rely on classist slurs and weaponised anti-racism terminology. The working class vernacular has given us terms like “foreigners are getting all the houses” and terms like this have come from regular people who have eyes and ears. They were dismissed and labelled by a state-funded NGO complex and the “working opposition” parties. We now know the truth, which is that yes, it is apparent that AHBs are prioritising IPAS where possible in the allocation process.
This leaves us with a fork in the road in Irish politics. We can look at the housing crisis as the unifying rallying point for the masses and represent their grievances or we can look at it tribally, where we all try to score our way through another summer of culture wars. I am personally too long in the tooth to not try and foster a new movement on the housing privatisation issue, where we address the legitimate native grievances around proportionality and scale of accommodation provided to foreign nationals along the way. Many will call me and others who advocate for public housing to remain fully under local authority remit socialist or communist. Many will also call those on the Left who want to advocate for proportionate native housing provision as “pandering to the right” or fascist. It is high time we burst out through those labels as a new movement and give the next few years of our lives to the fight to save public housing.
Lastly, I need to address the Right2Housing movement. Right to housing combined with this new privatisation model will lead to only one outcome: the right for these AHBs which will soon be merged into a semi-State body to sue the state if they do not release funds to them in order to meet demand pressures. This would be a blank cheque pipeline to investment capital to cover the cost of providing homes that neither the people nor the state will own. This will turn the population of Ireland once more into a nation of tenants. Right2Housing must be dropped until public housing is saved and ringfenced back within local authorities. I look forward to hearing from any activist or group who is interested in creating new anti-establishment politics in Ireland free from Foreign and State influence.