Organising in a Tempest: CATU and the challenges of housing activism

by Pádraig Mac Oscair

Pádraig Mac Oscair is a CATU activist who has been involved since 2020, having been involved in housing activism for a number of years prior.

Ireland, like much of the Western world, is several years into a housing crisis which has seen rents and house prices reach record highs and a generation locked out of ever renting, let alone buying a home. A wave of housing activism, from Housing Action Now to Home Sweet Home to Take Back The City, has emerged in response to the different aspects of the crisis, from homelessness to land hoarding. Unfortunately, many of these groups have either disbanded or fallen dormant within a short time after a brief period of intense activity, owing to the sheer immensity of the challenges faced in confronting the legacy left by Ireland’s landlord economy.

CATU are an interesting exception, having grown exponentially and sustained a genuinely national movement that now encompasses approximately 1,750 members in 29 counties. Founded in October 2019, CATU (Community Action Tenants Union) calls itself “a community-based union for tenants”. But just what is that?

Leinster organiser Helen Moynihan described it as follows:

“We are a union, the same way that a trade union is a union - it’s a collection of people who pay dues into a union and have democratic ownership over it. We obviously mainly advocate over housing issues, but also community issues - it’s Community Action Tenants Union. The only people who can’t be members are landlords and estate agents, basically anyone who facilitates evictions. We have local branches, so a lot of our work is local and responsive, but we also have a national organisation which runs national campaigns.

We have two organisers for the Leinster region. Obviously my role is to organise the branches themselves, and to take on other work they don’t have time to do.

CATU runs on dues. The fact CATU is member-led by people who’re doing this for free is the only thing that makes it work - it becomes a part of your everyday life which is incredible and hugely important. You need a level of structure, and that’s where staff come into play - that’s a fundamental part of union organising.”

CATU’s model

CATU’s organising is run on a model in which local groups tailor their activities to issues affecting a particular area – for instance, CATU Liberties-Rialto campaigns against the sacrifice of local amenities needed by the community to provide car parks for the hotels rapidly springing up in the area. These local campaigns are complemented by a national infrastructure, in which full-time staff such as Helen provide organisational support and coordinate campaigns based on national issues.

This model was inspired by groups such as ACORN and Living Rent in the UK, with a number of CATU activists who had previously been involved in groups such as Louth Housing Action and Dublin Central Housing Action travelling across to learn from their experiences [1]. Much like CATU, these groups have a dues-based membership structure which makes it possible for them to hire full-time staff who can organise at a national level to complement a network of local branches focused on the issues affecting their immediate environment [2]. From here, CATU branches can work to place concrete, achievable demands on people who can grant them, be they landlords who withhold deposits or negligent local government. This emphasis on individual community-focused activism driven by each branch’s membership’s concerns differentiates a group like CATU from a political party and other housing bodies which may be more focused on homelessness services. As Helen explains:

“CATU is very grassroots, built out of a lot of different housing groups who decided to put the union model into practice when it came to housing issues in Ireland. It’s a direct action group - if you were to compare it to Threshold, which is about advocacy and casework, CATU is about direct action going directly to the cause of the problem. It’s a union using people power in the face of the financial and legal power of landlords within our current housing model. CATU is about people coming together in the face of the housing crisis not only to campaign on the larger issues, but also to tackle the local and personal issues within housing - such as evictions or stolen deposits. Evictions are one of the major issues in our state - CATU would see them as unconscionable and it’s very important that CATU are a group resisting evictions, which not all housing groups can do.”

““there have been challenges to truly effective organising which mirror those experienced by other unions””

Centrality of direct action

Direct actions provide the basis for local CATU groups to organise tenants, empower their members and expand the union, as well as drawing attention to the truly national nature of the housing crisis. CATU Limerick were involved in organising against the evictions at Shannon Arms in Limerick in May of this year, in which over 100 tenants were threatened with sudden eviction [3]. This direct action to keep families in their apartments when they had nowhere else to go in a city with just ten rental homes on the market helped draw attention to how severe the housing crisis truly is, as well as just who benefits – CATU branches across the country held a co-ordinated picket action outside branches of Supermacs to draw attention to how Pat McDonagh was the evicting landlord in a number of these cases and demonstrated how CATU’s structure allows for national organisation to complement local activity [4].

Whilst a tenants union is undoubtedly a welcome presence for many renters, there have been challenges to truly effective organising which mirror those experienced by other unions. Ireland, particularly since the passage of the 1990 Industrial Relations Act, has seen union density dwindle drastically. Just 28% of the Irish labour force are currently members of a trade union compared to 62% in the early 1980s, a figure which is itself distorted by the relatively strong rates of unionisation in the public sector. When considered on a sector-by-sector basis, the figures for unionisation can be as low as 7% in the hospitality sector or 8% in communications and information jobs [5]. This is complemented by a general decline in political involvement amongst the wider public that has seen mass political party membership largely become a thing of the past since the 1980s. For example, the proportion of Irish people who were members of a political party fell by 44.67% from 1980-2009 [6].

Housing organisations have sadly not been exempt from this decline in political engagement. One of CATU’s obvious ancestors, the National Association of Tenants Organisations, was a major factor in the rent strikes that brought about structural reforms to how social housing was managed in the 1970s. Nearly 100,000 families participated in this strike at its peak [7]. However, this level of engagement was not sustained, and the organisation had largely become dormant by the 21st century. This fate was mirrored by that of the other major story of Irish housing activism in this period, the Concerned Parents Against Drugs campaign against drug-dealing in housing estates [8].

Single issue struggles

The water charges campaign, alongside the marriage equality and Repeal movements, provided a welcome counterexample to this trend and illustrated that many people, particularly younger people, weren’t necessarily disengaged from politics. However, these movements were single-issue campaigns which united a broad coalition that generally dissolved following the deferral of the water charges controversy and the successful repeal campaigns, as many activists came to feel the goals of the movement had been achieved.

Taken in combination, this has led to an unpromising environment for any new political organisation to emerge, let alone one which tackles an issue as multifaceted and complex as housing with no obvious law that can be passed to solve the issue. Whilst it is a real achievement to have attracted 1,750 members within three years of being founded, particularly given how much of CATU’s organising has been interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, Helen admits that the generally marginal status of unions in contemporary Ireland, and people’s preconceived notions of what organisation can achieve, have hindered CATU’s expansion.

“The concept of a union is quite far out of people’s mind so it’s hard to convince people how useful it is to be in a union. We also have to convince people that the current legal morality around housing is inappropriate. You’re contradicting a widely-held belief. As people get more and more disenfranchised, it’s hard to know whether this will make people organise or make them give up. Ultimately the challenge will always remain - people’s collective understandings of unions are broken and people are exhausted by contemporary life and do not have the time or energy to organise. People in uncomfortable housing situations are often too overwhelmed to reach out, and people in comfortable housing situations are too relieved to take this additional work on. The challenge ultimately lies in mobilising communities and people finding the energy to fight back.”

However, assumptions about unions that have been held for decades are finally being challenged. Recent victories for efforts to unionise within major corporations such as Starbucks and Apple, alongside the efforts of the Debenhams workers in Ireland and the RMT in the UK, have shown how organised labour will always be relevant. This comes just as many people are starting to suffer severely from the failure of wages to keep track with rapid inflation. Interestingly, UCD’s Working in Ireland Survey noted that nearly 66% of those aged 16-24 and 45% of those aged 25-34 who were working in non-unionised workplaces wanted a union despite being the least likely age group to have ever been in one (as many as 79% of those working aged under 24 have never been in a union) [9].

““people who have never done so before will have to come together in unions to fight for change””

There can be no more drastic example of wages failing to keep up with inflation than housing, where average rents have increased by 84% since 2012 [10]. Housing is the key element of the cost-of-living crisis for so many, and any solution that fails to take this element into account by advocating rent freezes, rent controls and security of tenure will do little to alleviate the pressure on those worst affected. Landlords, letting agents and REITs who charge €1,600 to live in a shoebox are profiteering off a crisis just as much as any Russian oligarch or supermarket tycoon who slices people’s real wages in a year of record profits, for all we are told that one person’s rent is another person’s income or that landlords are “leaving the market in droves”.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that in the workforce people who have never done so before will have to come together in unions to fight for change. A housing union where tenants fight together against the effects of the housing crisis could well prove to be an idea whose time has come for the younger generation, who have a very different idea of unions to those before them, as they face into a bleak housing future and lives that will be defined by the forces of greed and speculation driving this nightmare.

Article originally published in Issue 9 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.

Notes

[1] Neylon, Laoise: “A New Tenants Union Calls For An Extension Of The Covid-19 Tenants Ban”, Dublin Inquirer, 01/07/2020

[2] Torres-Quevedo,Maria Elena “Living Rent: Catching Up With Scotland’s Tenants Movement”, Bella Caledonia, 12/03/2021

[3] O’Rourke, Ryan: “Limerick Families Told To Stay and Fight For Their Homes”, Irish Examiner, 30/05/2022

[4] https://twitter.com/CatuIreland/status/1550052393622069249

[5] Geary, J. and Belizon, M. (2022) Employee voice in Ireland, First findings from the UCD Working in Ireland Survey, 2021, College of Business, University College Dublin.

[6] Mair, Peter, Ruling The Void (Verso, 2013)

[7] Neylon, Laoise: “50 Years On, A Tenant’s Union is putting together a history of the 1972 rent strike”, Dublin Inquirer, 22/06/2022 

[8] The Meeting Room, Directed by Davis, Jim and Gray, Brian, Dublin (2010)

[9] Geary, J. and Belizon, M. (2022) Employee voice in Ireland, First findings from the UCD Working in Ireland Survey, 2021, College of Business, University College Dublin.

[10] Poverty, income inequality and living standards in Ireland: 2nd annual report, ESRI, Dublin, October 28, 2022