Rory Hearne (left) with Apollo volunteers Anne Farrelly, Emily Duffy, Tommy Gavin (back)

Keep her lit.

Dr Rory Hearne writes:

The Apollo House occupation has achieved significant commitments from the Minister for Housing, Simon Coveney, to improve homelessness services and provide decent accommodation for Apollo residents

These achievements show that the Apollo House occupation has been an incredible victory for citizen’s power.

The Home Sweet Home campaign has lit a new flame of hope in Ireland that everyone can and should have the right to an affordable and secure home.

Apollo House marks the point at which ordinary citizens have said ‘no more’ and ‘enough’ of this shameful housing crisis.

The citizens have declared that the homelessness crisis is not acceptable and it is a national emergency.

Home Sweet Home, through the Apollo House action, have mobilised the support of the majority of people of Ireland, to state clearly to the government and Dublin City Council – that they are not doing enough and that citizens are going to take direct action where the state fails – and that citizens will monitor and pressure the Government until everyone has the dignity of a home.

Specifically, the Home Sweet Home campaign has secured accommodation for its homeless residents and that “the short, medium and long term needs, including care plans for all current Apollo House residents, will be met according to their needs”.

They also secured the commitment by Government of the provision of two new additional facilities addressing the homelessness emergency (at an investment of €4million).

Importantly, they have also raised the bar “on the agreed minimum standards” for emergency accommodation as these facilities, the campaign states, “will include residents having their “own key” to a place they can call home”.

This minimum standard will also be achieved “with the direct participation of residents” and include units suitable for single persons and couples”.

Dublin City Council and the Peter McVerry Trust have told Home Sweet Home that the extra beds in new hostels are now six-month beds with 24-hour access as a result of the campaign.

The Minister for Housing has also guaranteed that there will be no families in commercial accommodation (hotels or B&Bs) by 1st July 2017.

They also achieved the rollout of community-based homeless services which can address the major challenges faced by families facing homelessness and lack of services in local communities.

As the campaign explains,

“Home Sweet Home has achieved an enormous amount in a very short period of time. This is down to the profound outpouring of public support for the campaign with more than 2,500 people volunteering their time and services along with donations of food, clothing, beds and more than €160,000 in funds. It has facilitated the assessment of 72 individuals by homeless services with 42 people moving into six-month beds…and helped more than 200 people to access a secure bed through the homeless Freephone number.”

Speaking at the Home Sweet Home press conference yesterday – where these achievements were outlined – spokesperson Aisling Hedderman explained how Apollo House has given homeless people a sense of dignity and raised the bar of what is acceptable in terms of emergency accommodation.

She said:

“The Home Sweet Home intervention allowed the homeless to have their voices heard and it allowed the public backing of them…it has given them a new chance at life…The homeless in Apollo have smiles on their faces. They are different people – accessing education and looking to get jobs. They have been given a chance. They thought that society had forgotten about them but the campaign showed that we haven’t forgotten about them.”

Aisling explained that she has been a housing activist with the North Dublin Bay Housing group where they had “screamed and shouted and occupied and had sit-ins to try have the voices of the most vulnerable heard – because they are not heard in public policy”.

But Apollo House has achieved a “victory” as “their voices are being heard”.

At the press conference Home Sweet Home spokesperson Brendan Ogle explained that Apollo House “is just the beginning” as Home Sweet Home “will be a permanent intervention in the nation’s housing policy and discussion”.

To do this, they are opening a permanent Dublin support, advice and activist centre assisting people with their housing information needs. The campaign is also taking a legal challenge arguing that the 1937 Constitution contains within it a right to housing.

They are going to have regular monthly meetings with Dublin City Council and other local authorities to review and assess housing and homelessness policies, particularly the issues of “hidden homelessness”.

The other really vital achievement of Home Sweet Home is the highlighting of NAMA’s role in worsening the crisis and its potential role in addressing it.

The campaign still awaits a response to their letter from the Minister for Finance where they called on the Minister to prioritise NAMA’s social mandate over its mandate to “maximise financial return” and to use NAMA’s land and buildings to address the crisis.

NAMA’s end-of-year review, released last week, again showed the potential role that NAMA could be playing in providing affordable housing (it showed NAMA has €2billion in cash reserves and will be building the 20,000 houses on a “commercial” basis, i.e. pushing up prices to sell to vultures) but because it is focused on maximising a commercial return it is selling its land and property assets to vulture funds and property investors.

After Apollo ends, it is vital to keep the focus on NAMA and the fact that it still can play a major role in addressing the crisis by using its land and cash reserves to build upwards of 20,000 social and affordable housing – not selling it to the vultures and property investors.

This year NAMA expects to build 3,500 houses – these should all be sold for social and affordable housing to local authorities and housing associations. This needs to be monitored closely.

The continuation and expansion of Home Sweet Home is essential because the harsh reality is that the housing crisis is going to worsen.

The homelessness crisis is just the tip of the iceberg of a wider housing crisis where hundreds of thousands of families and individuals are in circumstances of housing distress – unable to afford their mortgage or rent and facing potential eviction and repossession.

Vulture funds are circling – as the RTE documentary The Great Irish Sell Off showed last night, they have bought up 90,000 properties and are holding almost €10.3billion worth of assets in Ireland.

They will evict to get in higher paying tenants or repossess and sell houses in mortgage arrears.

There are 90,000 households on social housing waiting lists and 35,000 families in two years or more of arrears on their mortgage.

And, alongside this, we have the Government consistently refusing to act in ways that could address the crisis – by providing proper security of tenure for private tenants, by funding the construction of social and affordable housing on a massive scale and by stopping NAMA selling its land and property to vulture funds and using it instead to provide social and affordable housing.

There is, as Fr Peter McVerry has said before, “a tsunami of homelessness” on its way.

And it needs to be remembered. We have been here before with this, and other, governments making big promises to solve the homelessness and housing crisis.

But the Government and Irish state should not see the ending of the Apollo House occupation as a signal to ‘return to business as usual’, ignoring the humanitarian crisis and focusing on rising property prises and subsidising private investment.

The Apollo occupation and Home Sweet Home mark a very significant transformation in the politics of housing in Ireland. Prior to this it was housing charities, NGOs and a small number of housing activist groups, academics and politicians that were raising the severity of the housing crisis.

Home Sweet Home has brought it to another political level – the majority of the Irish people have been mobilised in support behind a new coalition of activists, trade unions and artists who are espousing the need to deliver a right to a home for all.

As Brendan Ogle explained, there has been a realisation amongst people that “all of us have to step out of our silos and work in a unified way”.

And the groups and individuals involved are no longer just pointing to someone else and saying ‘that is your job to solve the crisis’ – they are now stepping up and seeing that it is all our job to take action.

Ogle highlighted that “we as a nation had crossed the threshold of decency and we had gone too far” and the Home Sweet Home campaign “has shown that it has a power to force change in the area of housing and homelessness”.

It is this power – the power of direct citizen-led action of practical humanitarian solidarity with the homeless (not just protesting but actually stepping in and providing a solution), and the unprecedented public mobilisation of support behind it, that is at the heart of why the Apollo House action and the Home Sweet Home campaign has been so successful – and why it is so vital to be continued in various forms in the coming months and years.

It was only such a high-profile action undertaken by this broad societal coalition that managed to raise sufficient awareness and focus public and political attention on this unprecedented housing crisis.

And that broad coalition has the potential to end homelessness and the broader housing crisis – by extending to every corner and community of Ireland – by mobilising every citizen affected and every citizen who cares, and bringing it together into a mass movement of community and solidarity demanding the right to a home for all.

Home Sweet Home has started the movement.

They have lit the flame.

It’s up to all of us to take up that flame for a right to a decent and affordable home for all and carry it forward – in our homes, families, in our communities, our workplaces, our towns and cities and make it real. It is possible.

We are the only limitation to its achievement. We can do it. Just imagine it – if Ireland was known around the world – as the country that actually delivered a human right to a home for all its people.

Wouldn’t it be incredible?

The country that emerged from famine and evictions – that resisted through peasants’ land leagues and revolution – only to collapse, over a hundred years later, back into evictions, homelessness and a new form of colonialism, the takeover by speculative vulture funds.

Imagine this little country finally managing to realise its people’s long-held historical dream for justice and equality.

Apollo has begun that journey of moving from the dream of a right to a home for all – towards achieving the reality.

As Aisling Hedderman so eloquently put it: “We can do this – we can continue this. It’s only the start. It’s not the end. Apollo house is only a building but Home Sweet Home is a community. It’s a community that we want to see in all our communities – we want our voices heard and we will continue to do so.”

Home Sweet Home are inviting the public to join them at 12 noon tomorrow at Apollo House for a ‘Victory March’ “to celebrate our first step towards ending homelessness. Everyone that has been involved and that supported us in this movement, join us on the streets to help celebrate a victory we all should be proud of. Solidarity marches will take place in Kildare and Belfast at noon and Cork at 10am.

Dr Rory Hearne is a policy analyst, academc, social justice campaigner. He writes here in a personal capacity. Follow Rory on Twitter: @roryhearne

Rollingnews

From top: People arrive to donate items at Apollo House on Tuesday night; gardaí also arrive at the building on Tuesday evening; and Dr Rory Hearne

Tonight/this morning

Lawyers for the receivers of Apollo House, Mazars, will bring their case to the High Court at 10.30am. It follows Mazars serving injunction papers on the occupants yesterday [Tuesday] to leave the building.

Further to this…

Dr Rory Hearne, at Apollo House, writes:

The most inspiring and radical direct action taken, so far, to end the worsening homelessness crisis in Ireland – which is now a humanitarian crisis – has been the occupation of Apollo House in Dublin and its conversion into homeless accommodation. But, the occupation urgently needs your help.

Yesterday [Tuesday] I went inside Apollo and saw first-hand the incredible achievement of this citizens’ ‘civil disobedience’ that is now providing a volunteer self-organised home for 35 homeless people. Those homeless people would otherwise be sleeping on the wet and cold streets of Dublin.

However, just days before Christmas they, and the Home Sweet Home campaign, face eviction from their new temporary homes in occupied Apollo House.

Lawyers for the receivers of Apollo House served injunction papers yesterday [Tuesday] evening to the occupants to vacate the property and the case is to be heard in the High Court this morning [Wednesday morning]. The public is being asked by the Home Sweet Home campaign to support their protest at the court this morning.

The amazing transformation of Apollo House, in just a matter of days, from being an empty disused building to homeless accommodation (and a ground-breaking movement to end homelessness in Ireland) is an example of what ordinary people can achieve when they get together and work in community towards the common goal of social justice and solidarity.

I was in Apollo House on the first morning of the occupation last week, and while the building was functional it was quite bare – being made up of mainly empty offices. The housing campaigners who lead the occupation were determined but very apprehensive about how it all might go.

In just a few days the place has been transformed – with a kitchen set up, rooms for the homeless residents, a number of organising offices and a relaxing area for the residents – with TV, tables and eating area.

But the most inspiring and heartening aspect in Apollo house is the creation of a community of volunteers (of which there have been hundreds helping and thousands offering their help) who are giving up their time to make this homeless accommodation and citizens’ ‘act of defiance’ a success. The volunteers include electricians and maintenance workers from the trade unions, to doctors, nurses, social care workers, security workers, media experts (and media is a vital focus with Rosie Leonard of the Irish Housing Network playing a vital role here) and other volunteers providing cooking, cleaning, administration and other essential support.

There are also bags and bags, and boxes and boxes of food and other donations given in by the public – an entire floor of the building has been taken up by it. Also last night a packed public meeting was held in the Teachers’ Club, Dublin 1, with hundreds in attendance offering their support.

And it is this massive wave of public support that gives this occupation a real power that a court injunction or eviction attempt by gardaí will find hard to stop.

This is because the campaign has won the hearts and minds of the Irish people. There is majority public support for the occupation as RTÉ’s Clare Byrne opinion poll showed that 75 per cent of the public support the occupation of NAMA-controlled office blocks to house the homeless.

And the reason why it has received such public support is because the objective of the Home Sweet Home occupation is urgent, practical, and yet also profound. It is urgent, as Aisling Hedderman, one of the coordinators of the occupation and an activist with the Irish Housing Network explained, because it is “about saving lives”.

And it is a practical solution to the crisis. Aisling said: “It is a practical way in which ordinary people can show their solidarity with the homeless”.

It is also profound, unique and powerful because it is an unlikely and innovative alliance of high profile musicians, housing activists and trade unionists. The support and involvement from the outset by much-loved Irish musicians and high profile ‘celebrities’ including Glen Hansard, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Hozier, and Jim Sheridan has given it a positive media profile and wide public appeal.

But, most importantly, as Aisling explains, at its heart are the hundreds of people supporting through volunteering and donating who are from a cross-section alliance of Irish society – with volunteers from working class and professional backgrounds working together – and business people donating and trade union workers helping to fix up the building.

I saw in Apollo a very impressive level of structure and organisation. It is a huge task of co-ordination to make emergency accommodation run on a voluntary basis to work. That they have done it in just a few stays is testament to the capacity and ability of ordinary people to achieve real change.

Volunteers are divided up into different teams such as outreach, support, and media – with everyone being given a role and a responsibility – and the homeless residents being empowered to be involved as well.

I sat in on one meeting where a team planned the practical support service for the homeless residents. These were people from different backgrounds – including professionals who have worked with people sleeping rough and it also people who were formerly homeless or suffered addictions themselves and wanted to offer support for those now affected.

In that meeting alone, there were 20 or so people there – all giving up their own time – to try make things betters for others.

This is what makes it different from the ‘usual’ left activist campaign. It is very different from marching in the streets. Here, in Apollo, people can see the change happening in front of their eyes that they are achieving.

It is similar to the broad societal coalition that made the water movement such a success (and involves some its key co-ordinators such as Brendan Ogle and the Unite Trade Union, David Gibney from Mandate along with artist, producer and activist Dean Scurry) but this campaign extends even further into the hearts of middle Ireland, people who want an Ireland of social justice and where the vulnerable are cared for – not left to die on our streets.

Niamh McDonald, one of the coordinators and activists with Irish Housing Network, accurately explained the purpose of the occupation.

She said: “It exposes the government’s inadequate response to the homelessness crisis and the way in which through NAMA they are putting profits and economic gain before the needs of our most vulnerable citizens”.

She also explained that it has received such public support because of the “frustration of the Irish people. The Irish people are frustrated with the lack of practical/workable solutions for people who are suffering the most. The people see the government prevaricating and promising policies but failing to deliver.”

Apollo House with its single rooms and its provision of a ‘home-like’ building for the homeless highlights the inadequacy of some of the existing multi-bed emergency accommodation in the city where there are issues of drugs, the lack of safety and lack of accommodation for couples.

As one activist explained to me – “the multi-bed (dormed) emergency accommodation treats homeless people worse than dogs. There is no dignity or decency in that. Here they are treated with dignity and respect – given their power to make choices – not treated like cattle put into a stall in a shed in Dublin city centre”.

The Apollo building is not due to be demolished for at least six months. It has been converted into an effective homeless accommodation. So there is no justification for evicting the tenants. It has been made safe – and is safer for the homeless than being on the streets. So why can’t the building be left to provide this much-needed accommodation? And where will these homeless people go if they are evicted? Back on the streets?

The reality is that the Government and Minister for Finance can direct NAMA to intervene and get the receivers to stop the injunction process. This is what should happen. The public need to see this and put the focus back onto the Government to change what NAMA is doing with its properties.

Rather than using them to build offices and penthouses for the wealthy, they should be used for affordable housing. This can be done if the government directs NAMA to do it. These are our public buildings, and there are many hundreds of them vacant across the city.

Even worse there are almost 200,000 vacant homes across the country. And the Government could, if it wanted, solve the housing crisis.

As Home Sweet Home stated tonight: “Dublin has 32,000 millionaires and the second highest rents in europe, seems like we must be doing pretty well. So, how then do we nationally have over 7,000 people and children in immediate need of housing with many more on waiting lists, we have people sleeping and dying on our streets, we have over 190,000 empty homes and we have tax breaks for the rich and crumbs for the rest.”

We know that the homeless on our streets are only the top of the iceberg of the housing crisis – with thousands of families, children and individuals sleeping in emergency accommodation, cars, tents, on couches, floors, and overcrowded houses and apartments, not to mention the tsunami of people who will become homeless as the tens of thousands in mortgage arrears are repossessed, and as people are evicted by landlords charging unaffordable rents.

So, it’s not just more emergency accommodation that is needed – but an immediate country-wide government programme of building tens of thousands of affordable, community and social housing.

It is clear to me that if there is an attempt to evict the occupants of Apollo house there will be a massive public backlash and uproar.

Apollo, and the public response to it, is evidence of a re-awakened spirit of the Irish people – after being beaten by bailouts, austerity and inequality – are now standing up for social justice. It has spread from the Right to Water to now – the movement for the right to housing and a home. People are leading where the Government has failed.

Rather than the closure of Apollo House – we should see its extension. We need more Apollo Houses – to show up the idiocy, injustice and immorality of a society where state owned buildings are being left empty and sold to vulture funds while citizens die on the streets because they do not have a home.

In the face of growing cynicism, of disgust with politics, of the rise in other countries of movements of hate, in an era of greed and individualism – the Apollo house occupation is a ray of light – of a community of hope and collective action emerging in our battered Republic.

Finally, support their call today to go to the High Court. They say: “Apollo House has through hard work created a massive community of people who stand against this crisis. Please support us outside the High Court from 10am”.

You can donate or volunteer through their Facebook page here

Dr Rory Hearne is a policy analyst, academc, social justice campaigner. He writes here in a personal capacity. Follow Rory on Twitter: @roryhearne

Previously: Live At The Apollo