1979
Mansion House Squatted
On 28th of August 1979, three families squatted Dublin’s Mansion House – the official residence of the Dublin Lord Mayor. The squat coincided with the “Ideal Homes Exhibition” taking place there.
Anarchist Worker reported on the squat:
![On August 28, three families from the East Wall area of Dublin moved in and squatted the Mansion House. The squat lasted for almost a week. The families on one side of the Mansion House and the Ideal Homes exhibition on the other. The families were homeless after being evicted by their landlord at 104 Church Road. The Corporation refused to house them because they did not have enough points. With 12,000 people on the housing list in Dublin, the points system is just a form of rationing and quite a vicious one at that. When young couples have to resort to having babies to increase their number of points, which is common practice, then it is more than time to declare a housing crisis and start a massive building programme with direct labour.
The Corporation insisted that it could not house these three families because it would not be fair to all the other families on the waiting list. Yet within a week of squatting the Mansion House they were all housed. This was a great victory for direct action and against the faceless bureaucracy which hides behind the points system.
Decent housing is a basic human right which is heing denied to thousands of people at the moment. Another generation of children is growing up in overcrowded conditions, living with all the tensions that kind of situation produces. It is quite amazing how fast the Corporation could find the resources to give Sean McDermot Street a facelift for the papal visit, but can never find the resources to provide decent housing and maimtainence.
There is an unorganised squatters ‘movement’ in Corporation housing at the moment because of the demand for housing. However it is still possible for the Corpo. to play off the legal tenants against the squatters. In this they recieve the help of many of the tenants associations, who often seem more eager than the state to uphold ‘law and order’ in their estates and flat complexes. Apart from the few incidents of old folk and sick people in hospital having their homes squatted, we support people taking direct action to secure housing for themselves and their families. It would be better to squat the houses of the rich in Foxrock and Howth but with the Forcible Entry Act it just would not be on, unless there was a strong organised squatters movement. The le[s]son of the Mansion House squat is that you don’t have to have more babies and wait years to get a house/flat. Adults and children are much too important for that. Take direct action and make the points system redundant. This is the wat to force the authorities to build more houses, and better ones at that.](/image/4/1200/1200/images/inline/mansion_house_squatted.jpeg)