From top: Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC) publication entitled ‘Crisis’, 1969; DHAC founding members, from left: Sean Dunne, Mairin deBurca and Eamonn Farrell in Liberty Hall in Dublin on May Day
The following is a talk given by photojournalist Eamonn Farrell, Director of Rollingnews and former Dublin Housing Action Committee [DHAC] activist, on May Day to launch a photographic exhibition at Liberty Hall focusing on the housing crises in the 20th century and 21st century Dublin.
‘Ironically in today’s newspapers and on the air you could get all the latest stats on the housing crisis. Not pleasant reading. I am not going to bamboozle you with further figures.
But if you will allow me I will try and paint a picture of my experiences as a housing activist in 1960s Ireland
Like many people in the sixties, I moved to England. Not just in search of work. I already had a job as a junior barman. In those days to be licensed to pull pints of the black stuff you had to serve three years as an apprentice and then two as a junior barman.
Ireland then was still in the grip of a conservative Catholic Church. No divorce. No Contraception. Gay sex was illegal. Women had to give up work when they married. Young mothers were being sent to work in laundries and forced to give up their children born outside of marriage. Priests demanded the right to question and interfere in the nature of your activities in the marriage bedroom.
Yes, that was the Ireland in which the tyranny of British occupation was replaced by the tyranny of a church exercising the moral oppression of the population with the compliance of an independent, but supine state.
I had worked in Kirwan House, a pub right beside what was then UCD in Earlsfort Terrace. It was frequented by students who were starting to get the whiff of new philosophies from the European mainland and were reading works not only by Sartre but by Marx and Lenin as well.
Bob Dylan was strumming, Luke Kelly was singing and O’Donoghues pub was only around the corner. For a teenager from Finglas it was heady stuff. But not quite heady enough.
In London I bumped into one of the students I befriended in Dublin and he invited me to come along to meetings of the Irish Workers Group (IWG), headed by Gerry Lawless.
Lawless had ensured himself a place in legal history by being the first person to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights. The IWG would have been described as a Trotskyist group, which meant little to me at the time.
The IWG held meetings every Sunday at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park And on a particular Sunday, I was delegated to speak. Of course I was nervous and nearly vomiting into my tea in the nearby Lyons Cafe, but it was nothing to how sick I was when I discovered the speaker before me was a young curly-haired radical by the name of Eamon McCann!
Now if any of you have heard Eamon speak you will know his mouth cannot keep up with the speed at which his brain is shoveling words onto his whiplash tongue. Needless to say I was a disappointment to myself and my comrades. Always meant to check with Eamon were those curls natural or the result of a perm.
My first task after that miserable performance was to go to a certain hotel where there was an international conference taking place, and at night cut down both the American and Soviet flags.
I duly arrived Stanly knife in hand and shimmied up the pole to cut down the American flag first. As I cut through, which was not easy, as once up the pole, my legs were wrapped around it like a pole dancer, I had only a split second to allow both hands free to cut the rope.
Suddenly blood was squirting from my hand, the flag was still in place, and I dropped to the ground like a fireman on an emergency call.
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