Kathleen Stokes & Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn
If you’re a regular reader of Rundale, you may have noticed that we’ve been experimenting with themed issues – welcome to our third themed issue, which is focused on housing in Ireland. Housing has, of course, been a recurring concern for Rundale since its inception. But this issue brings together five new contributions that approach housing and inhabitation in Ireland from different angles, offering different framings of (and answers to) ‘the housing question’.
‘The housing question’ was famously discussed in a set of articles, subsequently published as a standalone pamphlet, by Friedrich Engels in 1872. We take inspiration from Engels’ efforts to understand and get at the root causes of housing problems. This themed issue is not intended to cover every aspect of the housing question or, indeed, the on-going ‘housing crisis’. Rather, it points to some of its important features, while challenging us to not reduce housing to a set of numbers, a single tenure type, or a list of technical solutions detached from what housing actually is.
In some ways, a special issue on housing feels both necessary and redundant. We are all intimately aware of the reality of housing in Ireland, and live with its consequences daily. Many of our contributors also spend their time researching and critically engaging with housing and its effects on people’s lives. Our hope is that bringing together a set of articles that engage with varied housing issues from different perspectives will speak to existing debates and push us to consider new questions.
The lines of enquiry of our special issue pieces bunch together and pull apart. Several pieces pay particular attention to ongoing struggles in the private rental sector, including current policy changes and their implications for evictions, affordability, and housing security. Michelle Connolly and Fiadh Tubridy examine the influence of landlord lobbying groups on housing and rental legislation. In a separate article, Fiadh also looks at the relationship between the growth of corporate landlords and climate objectives around decarbonisation and retrofitting in the private rental sector.
The issue also insists that housing should not be understood simply as a supply and demand issue, but as a reflection of the wider political and economic forces shaping Ireland and the world more broadly. Luke Hussey’s review of Michael Byrne’s Beyond Generation Rent highlights some of the crucial analysis currently being produced around the rental sector, and renters’ everyday struggles to make a home within it. Mel Galley and Clara McSweeney’s piece shows the central role that art can play in foregrounding the intimate lived experience of housing struggle through Holdings, a remote artwork on housing and place that unfolded through the audience’s homes as a mysterious package, phone call, and cryptic website. We’re particularly pleased to feature an image from this artwork in this introduction to our themed issue.
When we talk about housing, we are talking about the spaces we inhabit and make our own. We are also asking who is responsible for constructing, maintaining, and protecting the right to such spaces across many different life stages and circumstances. Here, Tara Ćirić’s article focuses on young people in care, who have been sounding the alarm for years about the precarity of living conditions within State care. This particular articulation of the housing question, and how it both feeds into and is fed by wider inequalities, is a clear example of the State’s ongoing failure to govern housing.
We’re very proud to have brought together our special issue on housing, and we hope you’ll enjoy it. We look forward to publishing more work on housing, directly and indirectly, in issues to come, and welcome proposals for further contributions – please do get in touch if you have an idea you would like to develop.
You’re also all invited to our summer session (dates tbc), where we’ll be hosting a discussion on the housing question with our special issue contributors. Feel free to follow us on social media and watch this space for updates on where and when this will take place.
In the meantime, readers are also invited to look back at some of Rundale’s earlier interventions on housing:
- Better Things to Believe: On Eva Richardson McCrea’s The Decameron / Na Deich Lá: Rory Rowan reads Eva Richardson McCrea’s film as a sharp cultural critique of co-living and the alienated subjectivities produced by commodified housing.
- Breaking Barriers: My Journey as an Asylum Seeker Accessing Education in Ireland: A. Mohammed’s personal account shows how Direct Provision’s enforced accommodation system obstructs education, autonomy, and social participation.
- Breaking the grip of landlordism: Corporate Landlords and the Community Action Tenants Union: Juliana Sassi connects corporate landlordism in Ireland to global monopoly capital, while pointing to tenant organising as a route to resistance.
- Déjà Vu: From Direct Provision to Deportation Flights: Donal O’Kelly traces the continuity between Direct Provision and renewed deportation policy, showing housing and accommodation as tools of state coercion.
- Housing, Land, and Climate Justice: Fiadh Tubridy illustrates how exposure to climate risks and instances of ‘strategic managed retreat’ reflect wider land and housing inequalities.
- IPAS Centres: The Rising Emperor: Doyin Titilayo exposes how outsourced IPAS accommodation can enable arbitrary control, fear, and abuse within Ireland’s asylum housing system.
- Léirmheas: Smaoinigh ar an mBua / Review: Fragments of Victory: Harun Šiljak situates Irish housing organising within the wider history and limits of left movements after austerity.
- Public housing tenants are vital low-carbon protagonists: Fiadh Tubridy argues that public housing tenants are key climate-justice actors, linking retrofit demands to tenant power and public investment.
- Size matters – the case for regulating corporate landlords: Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn examines international corporate landlords in Ireland’s private rental sector, illustrating the entanglement of global capital investment with local housing development and tenancy rights.
- The Balance of Forces for Housing Organising: how do we push for reforms, and beyond? Aaron Downey assesses the political terrain facing housing activists, asking how reforms can open onto deeper challenges to private property.
- The squeezed model: why cost rental won’t change Irish housing: Killian O’Sullivan argues that Irish cost rental, separated from social housing, risks becoming a niche middle-income tenure rather than a systemic solution.
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