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: Video tour of previous Dublin eviction by injunction sites on the morning of Apollo House hearing
This video was shot on the morning of the Apollo House injunction hearing at the High Court, 21st December. As well as footage from outside the courts on our way there we had earlier visited the sites of other occupied buildings evicted in the last 20 months. We discovered all of them were still vacant and in most cases no visible work at all had been done on them.
Apollo house is a NAMA building occupied to provide emergency accommodation for homeless people. 35-40 people have been accommodated there over the last couple of nights. As expected the judge granted the injunction, it will come into operation on January 11th.
We visit 4 other occupations evicted after the same judge granted injunctions over the previous 20 months. All four of those sites are currently vacant and in 3 cases no apparent work has been done. At the largest, Grangegorman all the habitable structures have now been demolished, it had previously housed 30 people. [Read More]
Dublin: Huge Grangegorman squat complex evicted for second time
The massive complex of squatted buildings at Grangegorman was evicted for a second time in early August, this time its likely to be permanent at the plan is to build a huge number of expensive to rent student apartments on the site.
The eviction was anticipated and a lot of material was moved over the days around August 11th when ‘heavies’ broke through the gates but were told to back off and allow time for material to be moved out when the Garda arrived. The squatters were quietly moving to another large abandoned building nearby that had been squatted recently, the Debtors Prison on Halston street. Central Dublin is full of such abandoned buildings despite the worst housing crisis in the history of the state. Welcome to Ireland 2016 where protecting the rights of vulture funds to make millions come far, far ahead of needs of those without secure accommodation.
Parts of the Grangegorman site had been abandoned for 20 years as they were assembled into a speculative land package. The total site included 3 very large warehouses, 3 houses and 2 office buildings and a shop as well as one enormous central courtyard and a number of smaller ones. With the 2009 crisis the original developer ended up in NAMA who evicted the site a little over a year ago and then sold it to more property speculators, details below. This new group then abandoned the site so was occupied once more a few months ago and has provided housing to up to 30 people since then as well as being the site of art performances and solidarity fundraisers. [Read More]
Dublin: Abandoned prison occupied by squatters who want to open it as art / community space – State says NO!
What may have been the largest squat in Europe, at Grangegorman in Dublin, was recently evicted for the second time. A major hardship for the 30 people living there but one that was rapidly improved on when many of them moved a kilometre down the road and occupied a long abandoned prison.
The Debtors Prison on Halston street was built in 1794 and actually lies between Halston Street and Green Street. The ‘U’ shaped 3 storey building is built of granite and limestone and was built as a luxury prison for the wealthy who had run up gambling debts. There were 33 such rooms / cells which were rented either furnished or unfurnished. If you weren’t rich you were thrown into the basement, Dublin at the time had 5 debtors prison and this one alone could accommodate 100.
It later saw use as a police barracks, both the RIC and the Garda, and in the 1960s for public housing. After that it was threatened with demolition in the period when many historic buildings and indeed squares were pulled down to make way for ‘development’ before being leased by Students Against the Destruction of Dublin, a campaigning group formed by architecture students in the 1980s and then handed back to the Office of Public Works (OPW). [Read More]
Dublin: Squat city is under attack
Friends, neighbours, comrades, Squat City is under attack! The rich, nasty vulture fund who have acquired the place we call home have been given official, judicial approval to kick us out (and then try to make us pay for doing so). The injunction, granted on Wednesday the 20th of July, comes into effect on the 10th of August. Some time on or after that date, their minions will show up. And we all know what happens then.
[Read More]
[Dublin] Squat City Open Day, Saturday 20th February
Hey everyone!
We would like to invite everybody to Squat City on Saturday for our first open day since the reoccupation. Between 1pm and 5pm, everybody is welcome through the side gate on Lower Grangegorman, whether they know us already or not!
We’ll be serving food and showing people around the space and answering any questions they have. [Read More]
[Dublin] Squat City has been liberated!
Spread the word friends. The warehouse will soon be full of words; the garden has begun regrowing community; music and paint about to burst across the city.
At the lower end of Grangegorman and where the block continues along North Brunswick Street, acres of warehouses and yards and houses and space space spaces have been laying vacant far too long, once again. From developers to NAMA to developers to judge’s friends and back to developers for more and more money while people and places rot. [Read More]
Dublin: Summer of evictions – video interview
An interview about the wave of occupations and evictions that took place in the first half of 2015 in Dublin. It includes Grangegorman, The HSE houses, Phibsboro Road, Dream House, The Bolt, Avocado Bastard, Firehouse squat.
Video includes footage from many of the places mentioned and some rather random photos for the segments where we lacked video or photographs. [Read More]
Dublin: End of Grangegorman squat
Despite the call for resistance, the Grangegorman squat (AKA SquatCity) has ended in silence. In June 2015, keys were handed to the Gardai, with no fuss.
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.
[Read More]
Dublin: Grangegorman residents key points on the March 2015 attempt to evict
The text that follows was published by the residents of the squatted complex at Grangegorman on 24 March to describe the day long eviction attempt they successfully resisted on the previous day. It was initially published and handed out in leaflet form to people walking by the complex. The words are there own.
On Monday 23rd March, the squatted buildings at Grangegorman, where a community has been living for a year-and-a-half, was the subject of a violent attempted eviction by a large force of contractors and Gardaí. Here is a summary of the situation. [Read More]
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