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In November 2024, researchers from the ‘Just Housing’ project based in Maynooth University, which is investigating retrofitting and energy efficiency in the Irish housing system, held a workshop in collaboration with the Community Action Tenants Union Ireland (CATU) focusing on campaigns to improve conditions in public housing. This article discusses the significance of this event as a means to illustrate the connections between campaigns for better conditions in public housing and the issues of climate justice and achieving a ‘just transition’. It also explores the potential of these movements and the challenges which they face.

For the past three years one of CATU’s main national campaigns has been focused on public housing. The key demands include a massive increase in construction of public housing, improvements in the condition of the existing stock and the abolition of income caps so that public housing is accessible to anyone who wants it. The November workshop was an opportunity to reflect and share information on all the work that has been done on this campaign, while also building links between local and national issues in support of a more unified island-wide campaign. 

The event involved presentations about campaigns in Southill in Limerick, Mayfield in Cork, Davitt House in Drimnagh, Rathmines Avenue, Ballymun and Cromcastle Court in Kilmore. Author and campaigner John Bissett gave an insightful presentation on the fight for regeneration of St Michael’s Estate in Inchicore.

Retrofitting and public housing conditions  

An obvious question to be addressed at this point: what is the connection between, on the one hand, campaigns to improve conditions in public housing and, on the other, the issues of retrofitting and climate action?

As was apparent throughout the workshop, questions related to damp, mould and heating costs are central to contemporary campaigns around public housing and are typically some of the primary grievances driving organising in this area. Researchers from the Just Housing research project have previously provided an overview of some of the maintenance problems in public housing. However, the workshop gave a valuable, on the ground perspective based on conversations and direct experience. Participants described and shared photos of chronic mould, problems with ventilation, lack of insulation, exorbitant energy costs and non-functional heating systems, alongside a whole array of other maintenance issues.

While retrofitting is a technocratic term more associated with climate policy and emissions calculations, at a basic level the works involved in a retrofit – new windows, doors, insulation, and upgraded heating systems – are amongst those most urgently needed in many publicly-owned homes.

Looking back at earlier campaigns about public housing conditions, one key example was in Dublin’s Dolphin House estate. After the collapse of the estate’s public private partnership regeneration plan that followed the financial crisis and property market crash, tenants on the estate were left living in atrocious conditions. In 2009 residents and community development organisations began a campaign to improve conditions with the primary tactic being an international legal case which ultimately found that the Irish government was in breach of the European Social Charter. In the immediate term, the campaign forced DCC to upgrade 40 of the homes left in the estate by installing double glazed windows and additional insulation.

Thus, while the tenants’ concerns were about their immediate health and wellbeing rather than BER ratings and emissions, their efforts led to works which we would now recognise as retrofits and energy efficiency improvements (and may well have ended up being counted towards DCC’s retrofit targets). It is further notable that this investment was only secured in the face of determined state resistance, which shows the hollowness of official discourses about the need for education and ‘behavioural change’ to promote uptake of retrofits.

In some cases (and perhaps increasingly), tenants’ demands have been framed in terms of retrofits and the links to climate change have been made explicit. One notable example was a protest organised by CATU Crumlin/Drimnagh outside a Dublin City Council climate committee meeting in 2023, to highlight the council’s lack of action on retrofitting in Davitt House. The tenants’ full list of demands included replacement of all windows and doors and full insulation for all homes in the estate, alongside other improvements. 

The situation where tenants are fighting for combined social and environmental improvements has clear parallels with Daniel Aldana Cohen’s analysis of housing activists in Brazil. He describes these activists as key “low carbon protagonists” because they have been fighting for high quality inner city public housing and public transport, often conflicting with the neoliberal forms of urban greening and gentrification promoted by ‘green policy elites.’

We should recognise the environmental and climate significance of public housing organising in Ireland. In fact, public housing tenants and those involved in organising these campaigns are one of the most important and (potentially) well-organised and cohesive forces for climate justice in Ireland.

The significance and scope of public housing organising

While we can begin to see the importance of campaigns for public housing from a climate perspective, it is important to note that the scope and potential of these campaigns exceeds issues limited to the immediate fabric of the home, energy efficiency and maintenance.

The issues raised by attendees at the workshop also related to the local environment and community, such as access to public transport and the use and control of green spaces – “there’s nothing for the kids” being one of the most commonly heard complaints on the doors. This illustrates how the concerns being raised by public housing residents have implications for fundamental issues of democratisation and control over one’s living environment. 

Speaking about recent regeneration schemes, John Bissett highlighted that quality of life on public housing estates relates to a much wider range of issues than simply the physical condition of the homes themselves: “We need to think organically and about what’s going to happen when people move in. One of the key things obviously is that people have decent jobs and decent healthcare. They’re the keys. Let’s deliver them as well as the housing.”

Beyond the immediate issues being raised on the doors, attendees also pointed to the critical importance of these campaigns to combatting the far right. The hope is that “providing a clear target”, in other words pointing out that ultimate responsibility for many of the problems facing working class communities lies with councils and central government rather than migrants will help to undercut the growth of racist movements which are, of course, typically also fanatically climate-denialist.

Tactics and successes  

When considering the basic features of these campaigns, workshop presentations highlighted common tactics and organising tools, including doorknocking, mapping, leafletting, gathering complaints forms, housing support groups and various forms of protests and actions. It is worth highlighting that there is ongoing discussion on the balance between more disruptive, and potentially effective, actions as well as the need to build relationships with trade unions and avoid alienating local authority workers.

There have been notable successes including securing a very significant amount of investment and repairs across different councils, such as the replacement of all windows in Davitt House. In Mayfield, the CATU branch has won the right to represent tenants in meetings and negotiations with Cork City Council. 

It was noted, however, that it is difficult to keep track and publicise successes because councils generally don’t want to acknowledge that improvement works are the result of increased pressure linked to tenant organising. Further, organisers felt that work carried out by councils is often carefully targeted to, as one CATU member described it, “neutralise” the most vocal and effective tenants and demobilise campaigns.

It’s also the case that repairs and refurbishment programmes carried out by councils are done to a very poor standard and don’t properly fix the issues (or can even make them worse). This applies even in the case of refurbishments won through tenant organising, such as the disastrous retrofitting programme in Cromcastle Court in the mid-2010s. As such, we need to build tenant power for long term control and management of estates rather than simply securing once-off victories.

Challenges and future prospects  

These campaigns are, unsurprisingly, not without their challenges. A key issue is the fragmentation and divisions within working class communities, with growing support for the far right being just one example of this.

Public housing tenants are recognised as a strategically important constituency in the housing movement because they have a shared landlord and relatively stable, cohesive communities compared with the fragmentation and alienation of the private rental sector. In theory, this provides more fertile ground for organising. In practice, however, the experience of recent (and historic campaigns) shows that this is not entirely accurate.

One issue that was apparent from the workshop attendance was that there is continued division between ‘organisers’, mostly younger, active CATU members who are private renters or mortgage-holders (who made up the majority of attendees) and public housing tenants themselves. So far, these campaigns have not translated into public housing tenants leading campaigns themselves or becoming active union members in large numbers.

Further it was noted that once problems are fixed there is a tendency for tenants to drop away, which reflects a widespread tendency to treat organisations such as CATU ‘as a service’ which can be relied upon in times of crisis. In response, one attendee highlighted that “we need to keep reinforcing what CATU is about. We need to get the message out there about what a union is”.

These issues relate to the context of residualisation of public housing, referring to the fact that it has becoming progressively a smaller and more stigmatised section of the housing system reserved only for what are seen as the most desperate and deserving cases. Related to this, many tenants face additional inequalities related to access to healthcare, employment and caring responsibilities that make it difficult to become politically active.  As described by Hearne and Kenna (2014) “the deteriorating conditions across estates in Dublin in the 2000s made successful cross-city organization very difficult to achieve.”

Likewise something that has come up through the survey work carried out for the Just Housing research project is how the residualisation of public housing and the failure of councils to maintain their properties contributes to further stratification within estates – in other words, between tenants who can afford to invest in improving their own homes, compared with those who can’t and are left living in desperate conditions.

Another related issue is the difficulty of cohering the local organising into a unified, island-wide campaign for public housing. As it stands, most of the work that has been done so far has been in the context of relatively isolated and highly localised campaigns loosely connected through the union structure. CATU has faced “challenges to connecting local and national issues – for instance, linking the union’s national campaign for public housing with the specific problems and demands of local members.”

While this is partly linked to the union’s local branch structure, it is also connected to the fact that the burden of sustaining local campaigns continues to fall primarily on a small number of active members and organisers rather than being taken up by tenants themselves, leaving little capacity for a more coordinated national campaign. 

Despite this, there is clearly scope for a more coherent and unified campaign as well as the intensification and massification of local struggles, that would contribute to climate justice alongside other forms of social transformation. There is, as one attendee put it “a will for change.”

Readers can find out more about the Just Housing project through our website: https://mu.ie/justhousing