The Establishment’s Long War On Our Estates

As a council tenant I’ve been fighting alongside other Dublin City Council tenants since before Christmas 2025 to try to overturn rent hikes imposed on some of the poorest working class families in the city.

The council’s claim, backed up by councillors from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens, that the money raised would be used for maintenance is wearing very thin seeing as a new government report on social housing nationwide explicitly says the purpose of the rent hikes is to bring households with multiple earners up to market rent.

The 77 page report called “Local Authorities Differential Rent Schemes and Rent Reviews” by the Value for Money Unit of the Local Government Audit Service says: “Upper thresholds on rent levied on subsidiary income should also be removed to facilitate closer alignment with market rent for households with higher income levels.”

They want “closer alignment with market rent”. But market rent is set by the greed of private landlords who are assisted by a government policy that limits supply of social homes to push people into the arms of these profiteers. So the government now wants private landlords to set rents in the social housing sector!

This follows on from a report last year that argued for one “affordable” sector that amalgamated social and cost rental housing. Let’s be clear: this has absolutely nothing to do with maintenance of our estates and is just another attack on the decades long war on social housing.

At the start of the 1980s they were building up to 8,000 social homes a year but by the end of the decade that had collapsed to 800. After the surrender grant of 1984 they sold off stock and refused to replace it. This also helped them ghetto-ise the estates, all the better to scare workers away from social housing.

The demand for homes raced ahead of supply and even though they upped social housing construction for a bit during the Celtic Tiger Fianna Fáil followed by Fine Gael and Labour sacrificed social housing to bail out the bankers.

In 2015 Fine Gael Labour built just 75 social housing units when a SIPTU report from that year estimated over 6,000 social homes a year were needed at a minimum. Meanwhile they pushed more and more people into HAP which started in September 2014, subsidising private landlords and classing people still trapped in the private markets as “housed”.

I remember Fatima Mansions flats in the 1980s when they took the caretakers out, maintenance was intentionally withdrawn and now older complexes like Oliver Bond are riddled with mould and damp because of decades worth of neglect. But we have to see it all as one ongoing long war against our estates.

From the surrender grants that pulled working families out of the estates in the 80s to the decades long criminal neglect of our estates, from the lowering of income thresholds to try make social housing inaccessible to most workers, to the current strategy of eventually raising council rents to market levels.

It’s called neoliberalism, we used to call it Thatcherism. Run down everything public, then sell it off. That’s the establishment mantra. But what can we do?

We have to keep up the pressure on the council over the rent hikes. The next budget is voted on in November and we have to ramp up the protests in the run up to it. But we also have to understand that as long as we live under a system where the market is God, public housing will be under threat day in, day out and the long war on our estates will continue.

We need to put the working class in the driving seat of our cities and it’ll take a wider rebellion of our class to do it.