Socialist Republicans Escalate Action Against Landlords Charging High Rents

Socialist republicans from the Republican Socialist Action (RSA) group targeted a property in Dublin 12 last night over excessive rents in working class areas. 

The property was charging € 2,700 a month, which socialist republicans say is unaffordable for working class communities. 

“Young people of Dublin, you deserve to be housed. You deserve to have a future.

Get off your knees and join the fight against the vultures who are robbing you of that future. This is only a drop in the bucket compared to the action that will be taken against the properties and people who uphold this unjust system.

You cannot ask the oppressor for your economic freedom, you must take it.

LET THE FIGHT GO ON, ” their statement read.  

Socialist republicans from the Republican Socialist Action (RSA) group target a property in Dublin 12 last night over excessive rents in working class areas. 

The latest RSA actions come amid an upsurge in high profile evictions by landlords employing shadowy private security companies, and a corresponding upsurge in resistance actions, such as the one taken by the same group at the start of the month. Thus, it is part of a wider campaign through which socialist republicans are seeking to combat landlordism and force landlords to lower rents, indicating a growing fightback in Irish society against the housing crisis. With landlordism rife in the country, it is up to the working class to fight back. 

Landlordism in Ireland is a result not of natural market laws, something inevitable, but it is a conscious policy by those in power. Due to decades of neoliberal social and economic policy perpetrated by this government on the people of Ireland, housing has become both scarce and expensive. Bad living conditions, landlords running amok and setting high rents, an entire system based on the extraction of wealth results in what Engels called social murder, where members of the working class meet premature, unnatural deaths. Homelessness and precarious living situations have become commonplace in Ireland. Recently, the Health Research Board reported that 124 people died while sleeping rough in 2022. The FF/FG government does not represent the will of Ireland - they have sold off the country to foreign capitalist interests, the EU, Brussels and America. 

It can thus be said that this is deliberate. Government rhetoric remains the same, that the housing crisis cannot be fixed overnight, while they continue to pursue policies that benefit the rich, the vulture funds and the multinational companies. This is happening because the government is tied by "a thousand threads" to the capitalist class, they too benefit from these policies, as Lenin pointed out. Rather than build universal and affordable public housing, they subsidise the private market to build housing, resulting in failure. The workers’ movement will build a new society, one in which basic human needs such as housing are not commodities, but fundamental rights accessible to all.