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A chairde,

The CATU Summer School is returning this year, and as we’re celebrating 5 years as a union in 2025, the aim is to make this a bigger and better event than ever before!

All the details will be announced in due course, but for now, keep the weekend of August 7th-10th free in your calendars - and if you’d like to be on the organising committee for the event, please take a minute to fill out the volunteer form below:

CATU Summer School 2025 - Volunteer Form

Last week, Steven from our Cork branch delivered an in-depth training session on all things Freedom of Information - what FOI requests are, how they work, how they can benefit our organising and lots more besides. If you didn’t make the session, Steven has made a resource pack available for our members.

It includes slides and notes from the presentation, as well as templates for sending FOIs north and south, a spreadsheet template for tracking the FOIs that you send, and more in depth FOI guides for sending requests both north and south.

Huge thanks to Steven for providing this excellent resource.

You can access the pack HERE.

CATU Belfast are participating in an anti-eviction march this Saturday, commencing in Danville Park at 12:30.

The North is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis with nearly 50,000 families on the housing waiting list and private rents rising beyond the reach of many workers.

Like in the South - loss of private rental accommodation is the main reason people are applying for public housing.

To make matters worse, the Housing Executive has started to deny families the right to succeed the tenancy of their family home, pushing public tenants into homelessness instead of increasing public housing. Unlike right to buy, these tenants are simply asking to take over the tenancies of the homes they are living in, and being denied.

Join the Belfast branch along with Trademark, An Dream Dearg, Anaka and many others in saying no to evictions and exploitation!

Enough is enough! Tenants in Cromcastle Court, Ballybough House, Ballymun, Emmet Buildings and other estates around Dublin have had enough of dangerous and unhealthy conditions, substandard repairs, transfers not being granted, and disrespect from Dublin City Council officials.

On May 12th, tenants from council estates across the city, organising as members of CATU, will be protesting to hold DCC to account.

Join them from 17:30 outside City Hall - and before all that, if you’d like to help out with leafleting for the event, there’ll be a group assembling to do so on Saturday at midday, meeting outside Russell Street Bakery in Dublin 1.

On April 29th, members of the union’s eviction database group, alongside members fighting against ongoing evictions by corporate landlord Vestry, spoke to TDs at Leinster House.

Discussing the findings and demands of the recently published CATU eviction database project, they pointed to the need to enforce existing regulations regarding illegal evictions, banning no-fault evictions, and for a housing system based on universal public housing.

CATU members all across the island were out in force at May Day events in recent days, participating in marches in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Dundalk, as well as running stalls, screenings and support groups in Kildare, Meath, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford.

Special mention to this outrageously good banner, handmade by CATU Cork members:

Our own Aisling Hedderman will be participating in a panel on housing at this year’s Robert Tressell Festival on Saturday, May 24th in Liberty Hall, Dublin.

Aisling will be joined by Lucky Khambule, Amy Moran, Paul Gavan and Mark Malone for a discussion which will itself help to build momentum towards a major national protest on housing in July - more on that to follow very soon.

You can pick up tickets for the event and find out more about the programme for the day HERE.

In Solidarity,

Naoise Faogáin
National Administrator

Community Action Tenants Union - CATU Ireland

www.catuireland.org