CATU News, Week 40

A chairde,

The next National Demonstration for Palestine, organised by the IPSC, will take place this Saturday. On this occasion, of course, we are approaching a full calendar year since this genocide began - as well as now protesting the escalating violence against the people of Lebanon.

As always, CATU will be present with a bloc. We’ll be assembling from 12:45 outside the Mandate offices on Parnell Square East, just opposite the Gate Theatre. Bring your flags, banners and voices.

*****

We’ve got another exciting training event coming up on October 16th as part of our mini-series about learning from international housing movements.

Firstly, we’ll be joined by Suraya and Andreas Scheba to tell us about their work with campaigns to pressure the City of Cape Town into using publicly owned vacant land and property to deliver centrally located social housing. They will talk about their involvement in the occupation of Cissie Gool House, a former hospital that was vacant when it was taken over in 2017 and has since become home to around 1200 residents (over 340 families), most of whom were either evicted from their homes nearby, or were homeless. Today the residents of Cissie Gool House are once again being threatened with eviction.

Secondly, we’ll meet Judith Lehner from the Centre for New Social Housing in Vienna who will talk about the realities of the Vienna model of social housing. Vienna is a city that is held up as an example for other cities to follow in how it has managed to deliver high quality, secure and affordable social housing to the majority of residents. Elements of the Vienna model have recently been introduced in Ireland through cost rental housing, but this is being done in a very different housing context and ‘home ownership society’ . Learning from the Vienna model and how tenants experience housing in that city can help us identify issues for campaigns to focus on to build a model of secure rental in Ireland.

The workshop is on Wednesday, October 16th from 19:00-20:30 in the Macro Community Resource Centre, Dorset St, Dublin 1. Please register to attend here: https://forms.gle/KQBCRduAEo6qP75v8

*****

On Saturday, October 19th, CATU Galway will host a training afternoon for members. This will cover member defence, recruitment and campaign planning. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how we plan escalating actions to support our members, how to speak to people about CATU, and how to plan a wider campaign. We’ll work on different scenarios, get some doorknocking practice in, and think about what areas we’d like to focus on for a Galway campaign.

If you’re interested, please fill out this short registration form so we can get a sense of numbers - https://tinyurl.com/5x8ua679

Our friends at Gliogar are organising another céilí ar an Cheathrú Rua (Carraroe) that evening, so we’ll be going out for a dance after the training – all welcome!

In Solidarity,

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