The Barricade Inn was a squatted social centre in the centre of Dublin. During the peak of its activity over the summer of 2015 hundreds of people were involved in putting on events in the space that thousands of people attended. In this audio we talk to three WSM members who were involved in opening up and running The Barricade about what happened there and what lessons they drew from the experience.
Dublin: Barricade Inn, Trials and Tribulations
Two weeks ago, at the judge’s discretion, the high court issued an injunction to make the occupation of the Barricade Inn illegal, coming into effect from tomorrow. It seems this may bring an end to one of the most ambitious projects the anarchist squatter movement has yet attempted. A radical, anti-capitalist social centre in the heart of Dublin, open to the public and right next to one of the city’s main thoroughfares. A valuable resource for activists to organise and engage with the public. A focal point for outreach, with the hope of spreading the dreams and ideals of anarchism that were its inspiration.
A cold but dry March night in 2015 was the first night we spent in the building. This was also our first chance to explore it properly. Along with chest-high piles of debris and rubble, a few rodent corpses, and at least a decade’s worth of dust, the place was also very obviously full of potential. Many of the rooms were pretty much functionally self-selecting, so suited were they to some of the projects we wanted to run. [Read More]
Ireland: What Housing Crisis? This is a capitalist crisis
Ours is a society in which, in every field, one group of people makes decisions, exercise control, limits choices, while the great majority have to accept these decisions, submit to this control and act within the limits of these externally imposed choices. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of housing: one of those basic human needs which throughout history and all over the world people have satisfied as well as they could for themselves, using the materials what were at hand and their own, and their neighbors labor. The marvelously resourceful anonymous vernacular architecture of every part of the globe is a testimony to their skill, using timber, straw, grass, leaves, hides, stone, clay, bone, earth, mud sand even snow. Consider the igloo: maximum enclosure of space with minimum of labor. Cost of materials and transportation, nil. And all made of water. Nowadays, of course, the Eskimos live on welfare handouts in little northern slums. Man, as Habraken says “no longer houses himself: he is housed” – Colin Ward.
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Dublin: The Barricade Inn, a new squatted anarchist social center
In the heart of Dublin, a new collective has occupied an old building, previously known as Neary’s hotel, to create a new radical, autonomous social centre and infoshop for our city. A few hundred metres down the road from the Garden of Remembrance — a place many of us know as the starting point for marches and demos protesting the injustices and manifestations of oppression and repression perpetuated by the state and the capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system that rules over us — we are reclaiming our city and reclaiming power and control over our own lives.
With this space, we hope to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, radical debate and an introduction to anarchist critique of our society. We will strive to provide a safe(r) space free from sexism, racism, classism, hetero-normativity and other systems of oppression. We want to create and foster our own culture, one that values and encompasses a diversity of cultures while rejecting the imposed dominant one, and that is based on freedom, mutual aid, voluntary association and respect. [Read More]
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