CATU News - Week 20

A chairde,

CATU D7 West are meeting this evening (Wednesday) at 18:00 in Hyne’s Bar, Stoneybatter. They’ll be talking about member defence, local anti-eviction work, upcoming solidarity actions, the local elections and more. Members will then be heading to Dalymount for the historic friendly between Palestine and Bohs ❤️

Tomorrow evening, a training event will be held in St. John Bosco Youth Centre in Dublin 12. The training will cover recruitment, member defence and action planning. It’s a great way for new members to become familiar with how we work, but also an opportunity for those with more experience to have a refresh.

The centre can be accessed by Luas - directions can be found HERE.

Tomorrow afternoon, meanwhile, the IPSC will stage another action outside AXA HQ in Dublin 1. There is an ongoing demand for AXA to stop investing customers’ money in apartheid Israel’s Hapoalim Bank. There can be no business as usual for companies who bankroll war crimes. Bígí Linn from 13:30 tomorrow!

CATU Fermanagh will be meeting tomorrow evening at Knock’s School, BT92 5AT from 19:00. The group will be looking to capitalise on increased membership numbers in the area with a view towards establishing a branch in the near future. All welcome to join and contact [email protected] if you have any questions.

On Friday, as part of Féile na gCloigíní Gorma, CATU Belfast will host a screening of the Rent Strike documentary followed by a panel discussion. It takes place in Raidió Fáilte, 30 Divis Street, Belfast and kicks off at 18:30. Click the link below to register your attendance.

Rent Strike - Belfast Screening

Sticking with Belfast, the branch’s ongoing Safe, Secure Homes campaign has yielded a sit-down meeting with the Housing Executive, next Tuesday, May 21st. Further details will be circulated in the branch chat and you can contact [email protected] or [email protected] with any questions. Huge congrats to all involved for reaching this point.

CATU Inchicore and CATU Liberties-Rialto’s collaborative campaign on the upcoming local elections has been going well. The campaign involves them contacting elected reps and candidates for their views on housing. On Monday, members assembled outside City Hall before the last council meeting before the local elections, trying to catch sitting councillors and press them on our demands regarding building and maintaining public housing, greater security for private renters, and managing short term lets amongst other items.

Click HERE to review some of the responses received so far from candidates.

Join CATU Phibsboro-Glasnevin, Mountjoy-Dorset and D7 West for a special housing action evening on Saturday, May 25th in the glorious surrounds of Mono’s Bar in Dalymount Park. The evening will consist of a Know Your Rights workshop at 18:00, a public meeting at 19:00 and a social with music from 20:00.

As you might know, members have been busy working on putting together a database of landlords who have carried out illegal evictions since 2015. Our main source of data is the RTB’s records of dispute outcomes, which are publicly available on the RTB website. Over the last three months, we have been working away at reading Determination Orders and Tribunal Reports for cases of unlawful evictions on the RTB site and putting crucial information into spreadsheets.

We have also been working on a website– a prototype of which is now being developed. We envision the database to be interactive and visualised on a map where we can see illegal evictions that have taken place. We are also sourcing narratives to bolster data representation and learn from the experiences of those who have been illegally evicted or who have organised eviction resistance.

In the coming months we will be going one step further by doing background research and building profiles for landlords that have illegally evicted tenants in the past. Landlord research is an incredibly useful tool for organising against landlords– knowing their affiliations, businesses, and their complete property portfolio and having them available at a glance will help us understand how to organize better and save time. We are looking for more members who would like to be involved in this work. At this moment, we meet monthly and do desk-based research independently on our own time. Email [email protected] if you would like to get involved!

CATU was represented at the general assembly of the European Action Coalition for the right to housing and the city (EAC) in Split, Croatia last weekend.

The conference included internal plenary meetings on how to keep supporting the different collectives around Europe through working groups, as well as workshops, walking tours and public panel discussions on the topic of touristification in the city of Split. In recent years, the city has seen the deregulation of the traditional rental market through tourism-driven displacement of tenants. As this is a phenomenon that we are seeing in parts of Ireland as well, it was very useful to skillshare and develop strategies together with other grassroots collectives on how to resist touristification and ‘Airbnb-isation’, to combat precarious tenancies, homelessness, evictions and privatisation of public and social housing.

The union’s National Committee had its monthly meeting in-person over the weekend with reps from across the island in attendance. Many items were discussed including this year’s Ard Fheis, ongoing campaigns, local branch and staff check-ins and more.

Minutes will be circulated to branches in the coming days.

In Solidarity_,

Naoise Faogáin
National Administrator
Community Action Tenants Union - CATU Ireland
www.catuireland.org