Tathony House - How We Fought Eviction

OUR EVICTION

It was a Wednesday afternoon and James had just got home from work as a community worker in Dublin’s North Inner City. When he climbed the stairs to our floor the landlord at Tathony House, Ronan McDonnell, was standing in the corridor with a pile of papers and handed over one saying: “unfortunately I have to give you an eviction notice!”

James was in shock at first and just said something like “oh are you selling?” then went back to our flat and sat down reading through the pages of the eviction notice. We had moved into Tathony House in 2009, paid our rent every month for 15 years. Tens of thousands of euro yet we were going to be evicted into homelessness!

The landlord at Tathony House wouldn’t accept any rent supplement or HAP tenants and everyone in the block of 34 apartments was a worker. Our neighbours were cleaning workers, security workers, retail workers and one woman was a lone parent and hospital worker with a 2 year old child.

As James O’Toole said in a speech to a Raise the Roof housing protest that took place in November 2022, one month after notices were served at Tathony House:

“Who are the people in Tathony House who are facing the prospect of homelessness? My neighbour Gurpreet is an Indian woman who works in James’s hospital, Vasile a construction worker who has an injured back, he’s given his body to build the apartments we can’t afford across this city. The people that work in this city can’t afford to live in this city!”

All of these workers were about to be made homeless - unless we fought back. We knew we had to fight and that if we stood strong the other tenants might stand up too.

Over the course of the next few weeks we would be featured in every national and some international newspapers, we were interviewed on Virgin Media and TG4, we got Dublin City Council to meet us to discuss buying the building, we beat the initial eviction notices in the Residential Tenancies Board and had organised our neighbours to resist.

We won an extra year in Tathony House - buying tenants valuable time to get their lives in order. We fought from October 2022 to June 2024 - 18 months.

As our eviction notices were served news headlines spoke of an unprecedented rise in homelessness and the threat of emergency accommodation loomed over us all. We weren’t willing to accept that lying down. No one should.

We were fighting for everyone in Tathony House and all of the thousands facing or in homelessness.

Along the way we’ve learned a lot about how to fight an eviction and hopefully this information will help you too. With 19,000 eviction notices served from 2023 to 2024 there are so many people suffering the threat of losing their homes. Don’t suffer in silence. Fight back!

PROTEST

After we’d read the eviction notice James called into our next door neighbour to ask him if he’d got one too. James went to work the next day and printed up a little flyer to put under every door in Tathony House. That first simple flyer to the other tenants read:

“Hi I’m your neighbour in Tathony House. We have all been given eviction notices. Get in touch if you want to join a tenant WhatsApp and discuss our rights and what we can do about our eviction.”

That first day we got 7 replies from tenants and set up a group chat, the next day a few more joined. James immediately sent out a press release about the mass eviction and we were in the national newspapers by Friday and held a tenant’s meeting on Saturday afternoon on the plaza at the Luas stop at James’ hospital.

The eviction notices were served on Wednesday, we made flyers on Thursday, we were in the papers on Friday and at the tenant’s meeting on Saturday afternoon we had our first protest organised and ready to go. We reacted fast!

We called the first tenant’s meeting at the Luas stop at St. James’s hospital because the plaza there had enough room for us to gather. Only 5 flats were represented out of 34. But from years of activism we knew that was a good start.

At the tenants meeting we discovered that some tenants had been given written eviction notices, some had just got text messages and some were just told to leave verbally. This was illegal! The landlord was being a chancer and breaking the law - he was hoping tenants wouldn’t know their rights and would just leave.

We explained to the other tenants they had rights and we had people power if we organised. No one except the county sheriff could actually evict you (and only after a long process in the courts) and that we had the right to contest this in the Residential Tenancies Board. We also explained we were going to demand the council buy the block.

We studied the mass eviction laws to see where we stood. But you can’t just rely on the state and its laws to defend you. Legislation is enacted by landlord TDs and legal bodies can often be prejudiced against tenants.

You have to be visible and you have to protest. A visible campaign, featured in the media, will be treated differently in the Residential Tenancies Board or in a court than someone who’s going in as an isolated individual. You have to show you mean business and kick up a fuss.

James appearing in the newspapers that first Friday was a reason some of the tenants decided to challenge the eviction. One Brazilian worker, who had 3 children, said to James: “when I saw you in the papers I decided to come to your meeting!”

It’s understandable that many people think it’s better to keep your head down and just go through the legal process. But that never helps. The bigger the noise you make and the more notoriety the case has the better things will be for you.

But someone has to stand up first to help others to stand up.

We organised a tenant’s protest outside Dublin City Council’s offices on Wood Quay the following Saturday. The protest got a lot of media attention, helped us to win over more Tathony House tenants and subsequent protests got us in person meetings with the heads of housing and homeless services at the council.

At that first protest hospital worker Gurpreet fought back tears as she explained her fear at losing the roof over her young child’s head and Madeleine Johansson said: “In Sweden and 14 other European countries it is illegal to evict tenants because you want to sell a property!”

In those countries the landlord sells the property but with tenants in place. The tenants then get a letter saying they’ve a new landlord. But selling a property shouldn’t give a landlord the right to make people homeless.

We alternated protests outside the Dáil to put demands to the government and protests outside Dublin City Council to pressure the council. We also protested outside our block - this was an important way to signal to our landlord to not try any illegal evictions.

This was a real fear for tenants - that we’d come home from work to find our stuff in a skip. By getting 150 people outside the block we showed our level of support in the wider community and it acted as a warning that this crowd of supporters would be back if he tried anything illegal.

We had protest rallies outside the door of the building on April 22nd 2023 and again on what was supposed to be our eviction day of June 2nd 2023.

Of course we didn’t leave that day not only because the RTB process was still going on (which means your landlord can’t do anything and even after that the process has to go through the courts!) but also because we had great support from the community, from left political activists and from the tenant union CATU.

Don’t underestimate the power of protest. At our first meeting with the council they told us “our hands are tied!” yet after another well advertised protest outside the monthly council meeting we were called into a second meeting where we were told they’d look into buying the block.

Every tenant facing eviction should contact their local council and ask them to buy the property.

We were visible protesting outside every council meeting in City Hall Dublin starting from November 7th 2022. James took on to do press releases and organise the protests while Madeleine dealt with lawyers and the Residential Tenancies Board case.

The campaign also gives you a focus to prevent the mental stress of losing your home getting you down. When you fight you feel better and it helps you deal with one of the worst stresses you’ll ever experience.

Every tenant in Tathony told us they couldn’t sleep, they were having nightmares about being thrown onto the streets or not being able to find a new flat. That’s another reason why you have to start protesting. Any lull in your campaign gives people time to be overwhelmed by stress.

When we started protesting the tenant in situ scheme, whereby the local authority buys properties of people facing eviction, didn’t have any cost rental component. But Darragh O’Brien gave councils the ability to purchase a property just like Tathony House with mixed tenancies.

When we first met Dublin City Council we were told there was no way to buy a building where some tenants were on the housing list and some were not. But we suggested social housing for those on the list and cost rental for those who weren’t.

I don’t think the changes introduced to the tenant in situ scheme would have happened without our high profile campaigning on the case which forced us into debates in the Dáil chamber. We also emailed every TD and Cllr every few weeks and updated them on the campaign and our demands.

How do you organise a good protest? Pick a time and date, create a simple graphic for social media, contact every left party, trade union, housing and community group you can think of. Send out a press release but try to think of a catchy angle that will get their attention.

We made sure to organise a press conference after our Residential Tenancies Board hearings to update the media. We linked up and joined rallies with other tenants facing eviction in Rathmines and at Applewood in Swords.

We tried to inspire those tenants to fight back too. When we met the head of housing at Dublin City Council, Coilín O’Reilly, he said: “you’ve certainly done some work highlighting your situation!” The protests were effective in so many ways - It pays to protest!

TATHONY HOUSE

Tathony House is a strange old building - it’s a dirty old block of flats in Dublin 8 - situated between the Camac river and the 40 steps that lead from Mount Brown down to Bow Lane West.

It began life as a malt storehouse for Roe’s Distillery of Mount Brown way back in the 1840s. It appears on maps from the late 1840s on. During the 1916 Rising Irish rebels made their way from what is now James’s Hospital back through these distillery buildings as they made a retreat.

The building was used as a factory over the decades and rebuilt in 1961 after a truck delivering chemicals set the place on fire. The front of the building is from that time and in 2022, when we got our notices, you could still see the join between the new and old buildings if you walked down the 40 steps, called Cromwell’s Court, beside it.

The building was a Helena Rubinstein makeup factory at one time and then a clothing factory and when the parents of our landlord, Ronan McDonnell, bought it they converted it into holiday lets. This didn’t work out for them so they got handouts from the state for accommodating asylum seekers.

They made about £400,000 a year in taxpayer handouts in the 1990s and Tathony House became notorious for the bad conditions in the building. One report from way back in 1999 read:

“The government has let a housing crisis gallop out of all control, allowing landowners and landlords to profiteer at will and regardless of thousands of people who suffer in unsafe, insecure, unfit housing.

The owner of Tathony House, Dublin 8, just one of the ‘hostels’ for refugees, has over 60 asylum seekers double bunked into rooms and earns £18 per person per night - £400,000 per annum. Forget Ireland of the thousand welcomes. It is Ireland’s shame.”

Eventually they started taking in private tenants but they never changed the planning permission - rented accommodation must meet a higher standard than holiday lets but to the day we left Tathony was still down on planning permission as short term lets!

We must have been on a very long “holiday” to be there for 15 years!

One of the features of the rebuild in the 1960s was that the new parts of the building wrapped around some of the old malt storehouse outer walls, meaning that some flats had the old malt storehouse wall as an internal wall creating rooms without windows or access to light. This wall was at least a metre thick.

The council told the landlord to stop renting one flat because of light issues. But when the eviction notices were served in 2022 most flats were being rented out and at least 4 flats on each floor had these access to light issues and the old wall running through them.

The windows had bars on them - like a prison.

One tenant was given a reduction in rent by the landlord until the eviction because he was told his flat shouldn’t be rented out and there had been a problem with getting insurance! This might explain why the landlord refused to engage with the council - he probably didn’t want any eyes on the building.

The councils should be checking buildings like this, but they don’t. The old building was always cold and damp and prone to black mould but the housing crisis meant rents in the rest of the area rose much faster than our rent did and so you end up stuck in a place like Tathony House.

The old factory layout was subdivided into flats using breeze blocks. And the ceilings, which were very high, were lowered using cheap grills with insulation material on them. There was an old elevator shaft in the middle of the block that sat disused and we had broken intercoms from the block’s time as holiday lets.

Blackrock boy Ronan McDonnell, owner of Tathony Holdings Ltd, was handed Tathony House by his parents and never had to work a day in his life, just holding out his hand and taking rent payments from dozens of workers while doing minimal maintenance on the building.

He was making €700,000 a year rent roll from the 34 flats and often arrived outside the block in one of his many stretch BMWs. His name appears on web searches of BMW owners chats where he buys and sells cars. Nothing better to do with worker’s money.

The family set up several shell companies like “Whitdale Ltd” and “Tathony Holdings Ltd” to run the place but the signatories were always Ronan McDonnell and his elderly father Brendan McDonnell.

When we moved in back in 2009 his mother ran the little office in the lobby and was ferocious if you asked for anything to be fixed. Ronan would tell you to talk to him instead of her because she was unreasonable. The building flooded several times during winters when tanks and pipes would burst and everything was always substandard.

That’s to be expected in a poorly converted old factory building that used to be a grain storehouse from the 1800s!

In early 2024, during a nasty cold spell, the water tank in the attic burst again and flooded the whole block. Some tenants on the top floor had their ceiling collapse into their bedroom and another had the ceiling fall down in his kitchen.

A little later a roof tile fell down and broke on the public steps beside the building. It was obviously an old factory roof tile made of compressed asbestos. The building was becoming a hazard to the tenants and to the public.

The landlord acted like a feudal lord keeping track of the tenants with a sign in book in the lobby and a 24 hour porter on the door. We never had access to the main door and always had to ring a bell to get into our home. Sometimes you’d be left waiting at the door. There was CCTV everywhere.

Once the eviction notices were served the landlord just allowed the place to run down to make us uncomfortable and leave. There was pigeon faeces piling up out the back. We understood that some tenants would start to leave in a situation like that.

Tenants were worried about illegal eviction and being stuck on the streets. Some of the people with kids were worried about their children. Many had to move outside of Dublin to find anything they could afford. One family went to Drogheda, another to Meath.

One couple had to move into separate rooms in different houses because they couldn’t find anything else and were worried about staying when there was a conflict with the landlord. One flat was rented by 5 young Romanian building workers and one of their partners. We lost their skilled labour - they went back home.

James tried to give the other tenants confidence by taking a brave and resolute stand in the media and at protests. At a Cost of Living Coalition protest outside the Dáil on April 1st 2023, when the government had lifted the eviction ban, he said:

“I’m sick to death of waitin’ for security thugs or bailiffs to come and kick me out of my flat. I’m sick to death of the sleepless nights. But I’m also sick to death of hearing about the 12,000 people that are already homeless. The 3,000 children that are traumatised. And will be traumatised for life because of homelessness. I’m saying right here and right now a message to my landlord, to the government, to the council and the Gardaí - I am not leaving Tathony House!”

Whenever Tathony House media coverage fell we would try to think of a new angle to get back into the papers. When one neighbour told me she was a nurse with a 4 year old child we sent out a press release. When another tenant told me he was getting treatment for lung cancer we sent out another.

By the June 2nd eviction date there were still around a dozen households in the building. They stayed beyond the eviction date. By protesting we won a whole extra year beyond that date. If there had been tenants left by July 2024 we’d have stretched it out for even more months.

Whatever replaces Tathony House, whether another hotel Dublin 8 doesn’t need or another block of expensive student accommodation, at least the name now represents a serious 18 month struggle by tenants to stand up for their rights.

TYRRELSTOWN CLAUSE

In 2016, after 40 households were all told they had to leave their homes at Cruise Park Drive in Tyrrelstown to the North West of Dublin City, the Department of Housing brought in a new rule called the “Tyrrelstown Clause”. This clause says that a landlord can only evict more than 10 households at one time if:

Leaving the tenants in situ would cause a 20% drop on the sales price compared to vacant possession and that this would cause the landlord hardship or be “unduly onerous” on the landlord.

The landlord at Tathony House was claiming this “hardship” clause so he could evict all 34 flats while living on a €700,000 a year rent roll and after his family had milked the taxpayer for £400,000 a year back in the 1990s! He was set to make millions from the sale of the building too.

In the last 20 years of renting the place he’d have made around €14 million. He should try working for a living and then tell us all about his “hardship!” We would include Tyrrelstown in our Residential Tenancies Board submission and were prepared to fight over the legal definition of hardship.

In the end we didn’t get to that argument because the landlord was so shoddy in how he handed out the eviction notices that he lost on a bunch of technicalities. We also knew that we had to try and get the building bought by Dublin City Council. We contacted the council and Approved Housing Bodies like the Iveagh Trust.

Madeleine emailed both and tried to get a conversation going about the feasibility of doing the block up and turning it into much needed social or cost rental housing.

Our protests had garnered such attention that my phone rang one day and a voice said “Hey this is Coilín O’Reilly head of housing at Dublin City Council do you want to meet? Bet you weren’t expecting me to call!”

As we wrote - at the first meeting the council said their “hands were tied” and they couldn’t offer to buy the building.

But after we protested outside every council meeting - the council agreed to contact the landlord which they did 6 times. He refused to reply or even engage. But this meant we could go into the RTB and argue that his claim to be suffering hardship and a 20% drop in sales prices with tenants in situ was bullshit because the council would pay him market price.

The landlord at Tathony House was choosing to reject the council because he wanted to evict 34 families and hoped to make a bit more profit from a private sale. He was willing to ruin dozens of lives despite there being a way to sell and leave people in their homes.

Our landlord had no other businesses we could find. But if a landlord has a shop or any other business we would have hit it with a protest picket and put massive pressure on him to talk to the council about the sale.

If our landlord had owned a hotel we’d have had sit down protests in the lobby to disrupt their business until they were willing to talk. We’d have found their leverage points and used them.

Ronan McDonnell had no social media presence and hid himself and his cash very well. But tenant’s union CATU found his expensive Blackrock home address on planning permissions and we knew we could find him if he tried anything illegal.

You have to rely on every legal means you can - like the Tyrrelstown Clause - but also use every other form of pressure you can apply. Landlords are greedy - if you can hit them in the pocket through their other businesses then do it.

Some people in the tenant union CATU suggested a rent strike to us but that would have given the landlord the ability to apply to the Residential Tenancies Board for a 28 day eviction notice on the grounds we’d stopped paying.

That was bad advice in our situation and it was better to keep the legal high ground when he had made so many mistakes - like giving verbal notice to some tenants. Why would we hand him a legal route to evicting us?

All tactics have to be examined in the context of your particular struggle and not be held up as useful in every single situation. A rent strike would have skipped us straight to the courts and defending ourselves there without taking months in the RTB. We’d have lost time.

YOUR RIGHTS & THE RTB

Most tenants don’t realise that an eviction notice doesn’t mean you have to leave. You can stay for a long time after the date on the papers and only the county sheriff, court order in hand can actually evict you. It takes a long time in the courts to get to that point.

Even if your lease is up you can’t be evicted with proper legal notice and a proper notice period.

Any lease agreement does not override your statutory rights. The Residential Tenancies Board is a semi-legal body and so a landlord has to go to a court to get an enforcement order to back up any decision eventually made against tenants.

If anyone comes to your door, even your landlord, and says “get out!” you can say: “No I’m not leaving unless you come back with the county sheriff and a legitimate court order” - then slam the door in their face!

If anyone tries to cross the threshold of your home without your permission they are breaking and entering and you are entitled to let them know you can legally defend yourself. They are breaking in - even if it’s the landlord!

If your landlord tries to remove you before the whole RTB and legal process is completed then this is an illegal eviction and you can get up to €20,000 from your landlord through the RTB. You are allowed to change the locks and keep the key and only give the landlord a copy when you leave.

You can get an order from the RTB that says the landlord must allow you back in. Often the Guards will show up and either say “this is a civil matter and we can’t do anything!” or they support the landlord.

In that situation you need to broadcast everything on social media, get local elected reps down and get them to demand the Guards prevent any illegal action by a landlord. Record any property damage for your case.

One of the later flyers James put under the doors in Tathony House was written knowing the landlord would read it. We intentionally put it under doors of flats we knew were empty. It outlined everyone’s rights but also said that we could each sue the landlord for €20,000 if he tried anything illegal.

We wanted him to read that.

You are entitled to a written notice and a legal notice period. If the landlord texts you - it’s an illegal eviction. If the landlord tells you to leave verbally - it’s an illegal eviction. If the landlord doesn’t give you a written notice, with a signed statutory declaration and also send a copy to the RTB that same day - it’s an illegal eviction.

Even if the RTB decides against you and the landlord comes to your door without having first gone to the courts to back up the RTB decision - that is still an illegal eviction!

The notice you are given gets longer the longer you’ve been living in your home:

● Less than 6 months - you get 90 days ● Not less than 6 months but less than one year- 152 days ● Not less than 1 year but less than 7 years - 180 days ● Not less than 7 years but less than 8 years - 196 days ● Not less than 8 years - 224 days

In order for a Notice of Termination to be valid, it must:

● Be copied to the RTB at the same time as it is served on the tenant.
● Be in writing (an email will not suffice). ● Be signed by the landlord or their authorised agent, as appropriate. ● Specify the date of service. This is the date the notice is posted, or hand delivered. ● State the grounds for termination (where the tenancy has lasted for more than 6 months or is a fixed term tenancy). ● Specify the termination date and also that the tenant has the whole of the 24 hours of this date to vacate possession. ● State that any issue as to the validity of the notice or the right of the landlord to serve it must be referred to the RTB within the time period permitted.
● From 6 July 2022, there is a requirement for the landlord to send a copy of all Notices of Termination to the RTB on the same day as the notice is served on the tenant. The Notice of Termination will be deemed invalid if this requirement is not met.

The minute you get a notice call housing charity Threshold and they’ll tell you if it is a valid notice or not and appoint a housing adviser to help you with your eviction. We often had our own arguments and were very confident but it was also good to have another pair of eyes on the case.

If your tenancy is less than 6 months the landlord doesn’t have to give you a reason for the eviction. After 6 months they must give a valid reason. If you have a fixed term lease they can’t evict you unless you break the lease agreement.

Your landlord can only end a tenancy after the first 6 months if:

● You do not comply with the obligations of the tenancy, for example, by not paying your rent on time ● The property is no longer suited to your needs, for example, if it is too small ● The landlord intends to sell the property within 9 months. However, this may not apply if the landlord plans to sell 10 or more dwellings in a development within a 6-month period – see ‘Restriction on terminating when selling multiple properties’ below ● The landlord needs the property for their own use or for an immediate family member (this only applies to private landlords) ● The landlord plans to change the use of the property (for example, convert it from residential use to office use) ● The landlord intends to refurbish the property substantially If your tenancy was created before the 11th June 2022, your landlord can terminate your tenancy for any reason when you have rented for 6 years. The landlord must: ● Serve a notice of termination before the end of the 6 years, and ● Give a notice period that expires on or after the end of the tenancy If the tenancy is not ended after 6 years, a new tenancy will begin. This new tenancy will be a “tenancy of unlimited duration” and the above exception will no longer apply.

By June 2028, all tenancies will be tenancies of unlimited duration and the above exception will no longer apply. This is because all existing 6-year cycle tenancies will have ended by then.

If your landlord ends your tenancy for one of the below reasons and the property then becomes available to rent again, the landlord must offer the property back to you within 12 months of the expiry of your notice period.

They must do this if they ended your tenancy because they:

● Planned to sell the property within 9 months ● Needed the property for their own use or for an immediate family member ● Planned to change the use of the property ● Planned to refurbish the property substantially

Your landlord must make every reasonable effort to get your contact details, so they can offer the property back to you.

Once your landlord gives you a notice you have 90 days to get onto the Residential Tenancies Board and ask for a hearing. They’ll try to automatically stick you in “mediation” but refuse this and ask for “adjudication” instead because mediation will be you, your landlord and the RTB on the phone trying to come to an “arrangement”.

You don’t want mediation and to just negotiate your exit. You want to stay in your home if not indefinitely then as long as you possibly can. With that in mind you might decide to wait until the end of the whole 90 day period to apply for your adjudication with the RTB because this stretches the whole process out as long as possible.

You have to pay for adjudication - but it’s worth it.

In our eviction the date given to most tenants to leave was June 2nd but the RTB was still in process on that day and so that made that date meaningless. Before an eviction can go ahead the RTB needs to be finished with the whole process and any subsequent appeals, then the landlord has to go to the district court and get an order to evict which can take further months and also be appealed.

We decided to throw everything at our RTB case while continuing our public campaign of protests.

Madeleine read all the laws around evictions, we studied previous cases, we talked to Threshold and to a good sympathetic lawyer. We had 2 sets of arguments - arguments that left a legacy for other tenants and arguments on technicalities around our own notices. If we won on technicalities alone we left no precedent for other tenants to follow.

We were always aware we were fighting for the next group of workers who had ended up in the same boat as us. We translated the RTB applications into Portuguese and any other language any of the Tathony House tenants needed. Madeleine helped everyone fill in all their forms and apply.

Our main argument to the RTB was going to be on the so-called “hardship” clause of the Tyrrelstown amendment. How could a landlord that was making €700,000 a year claim hardship as justification for not selling the block with tenants in situ?

And the council offer was on the table for him to take if he chose to. So how could he say selling to a new owner with tenants in the building would create “hardship?” Councils are authorised to pay market value and Ronan McDonnell would have had no loss of sales price.

His lawyer would argue that they would get €6 million for the property without tenants and €4 million with tenants in it and that the loss of €2 million would constitute undue hardship imposed on the landlord.

Making €700,000 a year for decades after your family took £400,000 a year from the state to house asylum seekers and selling a building for €4 million would constitute hardship? And remember the council had contacted him 5 times by that stage to purchase the block.

In the end the council contacted him 6 times.

Seems like a joke but he might have won the hardship argument at the RTB if we hadn’t thrown everything at the case. His lawyer claimed the contact from the council didn’t constitute an actual offer. But they never replied to Dublin City Council to open talks. They were making excuses.

Our landlord and his lawyer came to the RTB with a valuation they’d got only days before the hearing. They weren’t allowed to submit anything we hadn’t seen. We demanded the RTB adjourn so that we could read the valuation.

Don’t let anyone rush you. It’s your home you’re fighting for. You have a right to have read all documentation submitted by the other side 5 days before any hearing.

At our hearings we had a representative from Threshold with us but we also made sure to raise our hands and speak up when we needed to pull up the landlord’s lawyer on any key point. The RTB adjudicator was reluctant to let tenants speak and constantly asked our Threshold rep: “do you want to let the tenants speak?”

Our Threshold rep was slightly amused by this and said: “of course they can speak - James and Madeleine are well capable of speaking for themselves!” The adjudicator also questioned our Threshold reps legal credentials by saying “I know you are not a trained lawyer!” when he questioned the landlord’s lawyer. Expect this kind of legal atmosphere in the RTB.

I spoke to one woman from Dun Laoghaire who was being evicted along with her children from a house she’d spent her whole life in. She told me she’d gone to her first RTB hearing alone and she wished she hadn’t because the whole thing flew by and the lawyer for the landlord was ruthless.

If you need to slow them down then ask questions, ask for clarifications. Don’t be railroaded by lawyers. Bring representation with you - your local People Before Profit TD or Cllr would back you up. Or if you can afford it, bring a lawyer. If not, contact Threshold.

Remember: RTB hearings and the legal setting can be very intimidating for working class tenants and we would advise you to always go in with some form of support or representation. Don’t let the other side rush through the hearing, slow it down, ask for clarification on anything and everything.

At our next RTB hearing James noticed a problem, raised his hand and said:

“Hang on, the landlord signed the eviction notices back in October 2022 on the basis of a valuation they only got days before the RTB hearing? The landlord should have to produce the valuation he had when he signed our notice and claimed he’d suffer a drop in price and wanted the Tyrellstown get out clause to apply. He obviously didn’t have one!”

To sign a legal declaration that he’d lose money by selling with tenants in the block he should have produced a valuation from the time he handed us the eviction notices - October 2022. If he signed the page on the eviction notice appealing to the hardship clause then he needed to show what the market price would be with and without tenants.

If he didn’t have this valuation back in October 2022, when he gave us our eviction notices, then how did he sign the declaration stating he knew he’d suffer a loss of sales price by selling with tenants in the block? We’d caught him out! He’d lied on the notice by claiming a fall in price when he had no proof.

The landlord’s lawyer claimed they had had an old valuation but thought “a new one would be better”. But they couldn’t produce the old one. Afterwards, when we explained this to our lawyer he gave us a fist bump. That was an important catch. It was worth interrupting and pointing it out. It ended up being part of why we won.

Then the landlord’s side desperately tried to bring up the media attention on the case and claim James had broken the “confidentiality” of the RTB hearings by talking about the case to the media and on protests. James came back to say everyone had a democratic right to protest and no ongoing case could prejudice that right.

Madeleine noticed that the statutory declaration page of our eviction notice wasn’t signed either and that the date on our eviction notice was the wrong date too. We wanted a win on the hardship argument but threw everything we could find at the case too. We sent in screenshots of the text messages sent to other tenants.

His lawyer tried to rule them out of order because this RTB session was only about our flat and no other. But we argued that the text messages showed that our eviction wasn’t one eviction in isolation but part of a mass eviction. Surely that’s why we were arguing about Tyrrelstown in our submissions anyway?

In his summary of the case the RTB adjudicator noted the shoddy way the landlord had gone about the evictions.

The other Tathony tenants who went to the RTB took guidance from our submission. The landlord sat off screen at the online sessions and only his lawyer spoke for him. Often the lawyer looked embarrassed and their screen would go off as they argued over points.

Madeleine even read a Supreme Court case in which a local council evicted a Traveller family from their home into the record of our RTB hearing in case our lawyer needed the arguments (about the right to a home) later in subsequent court hearings and appeals.

That way we couldn’t be accused of bringing in new arguments because we put everything we’d need later into our original submission. In the end we won on 4 technicalities:

• He put the wrong date on our notice and although the written eviction date (June 2022) was before the eviction notice was served and this was argued by the landlord’s team to be a “slip” of the pen, the RTB decided that there was no clear future date - It could be 2024, 2025 or any year.
• He didn’t have a valuation when he signed our eviction notices and only submitted a valuation just before the hearing. He shouldn’t have signed a declaration claiming hardship without proof of sales prices with and without tenants.
• He didn’t sign the statutory declaration page of our eviction notice properly.
• He didn’t send a copy of our eviction notice to the RTB on the same day as he handed us the notice.

The other tenants won on 3 of these technicalities as we were the only ones with the wrong date on our notice. It was a great feeling to win as it meant the landlord could either appeal and try (and lose!) again or he’d have to hand us new eviction notices.

One tenant, who only got a text message, won indirectly because the RTB said they couldn’t rule on the text message because it wasn’t an eviction notice and that this meant the landlord could not proceed to the courts to evict the tenant.

We knew at that point that we wouldn’t have to leave our home for at least another year. A week or two later we found out the landlord had appealed the decision but just before the appeal hearing he dropped the appeal. His lawyers must have told him he’d lose again.

Madeleine told RTÉ News that tenants had received RTB decisions determining that the notices were invalid: “Tenants here are absolutely delighted and thrilled, it’s like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders.”

Madeleine then told the Journal that the residents wanted the verdict to: “inspire all tenants facing eviction to stand up, get organised and demand something be done about this dire housing crisis. There should be penalties for landlords who do not engage with the tenant in situ scheme and local authorities should be able to compulsory purchase to save families from homelessness.”

Only 5 households stayed after the RTB case. One man, a taxi driver with 3 young children, left just before we found out the news. The RTB had taken so long that he wasn’t sure that we’d win. He moved out to Meath to get somewhere they could afford - despite his work being in Dublin.

The landlord eventually issued new eviction notices but our notice period had to start again. This meant we got 8 more months from the day he served the new notices. Our new eviction date was July 25th 2024.

We had 90 days to think about going to the RTB with this new eviction notice. Our lawyer and Threshold told us it was a valid notice because there were less than 10 tenancies left at Tathony House and so the Tyrrelstown Clause didn’t count anymore.

This showed how weak this law was - a landlord could drive tenants out by making living conditions unbearable and once tenancies dropped below 10 he could legally mass evict families. But this was a continuation of the same mass eviction.

If we hadn’t got housed by the council we would have gone back into the RTB and made these arguments before escalating our campaign of protest as we challenged every step of the eviction process in the courts.

We’d have won yet another year by tying the eviction up in the courts while continuing to protest.

FIGHT ON EVERY FRONT

You have to fight your eviction by every means necessary. We understood from the very start that we had to fight our landlord, protest at the council and outside the Dáil, contact every TD and Councillor, join a tenant union and canvas the community.

There are some people who’d have you only focus on the community, others would just take the political route. But you have to do it all. When our eviction started we joined the tenant union CATU.

They did some great work and helped us canvas the area for support and got our neighbours on Bow Lane West to put up window posters saying “We support Tathony House!” CATU has some great activists involved. But at the heart of the union there are some people with “autonomist” politics.

Automonism argues that we can challenge capitalism without organising in political parties. James and Madeleine are socialists so they think all the best fighters in every struggle are empowered by joining together in one organisation that fights on every front - including using the Dáil and councils to amplify working class struggle.

CATU argued to us that having political speakers at one of the Tathony demonstrations would be bad for tenants, that it would “disempower them”. That was nonsense. We defended having TDs speak.

On any strike by workers or protest by tenants knowing you have the support of a TD like Bríd Smith or Richard Boyd Barrett makes you feel you have someone with a voice at your back. This shouldn’t be counterposed to community organising - that is very important too. Do both.

The union was a big help to us in Tathony House but we had to take their advice and think about it in the light of our own political knowledge and experience. On a very practical level we needed a political campaign to win legislative changes in favour of tenants like ourselves - just like how protests in Tyrrelstown brought about a legal change that helped us.

We needed to put pressure on the government and on TDs and local Councillors to highlight the need for such changes. A protest outside the Dáil wasn’t a “distraction” from community organising - it was a vital addition.

Without the legal changes won in Tyrrelstown we would have had a much more difficult time. The changes to the tenant in situ scheme, to include cost rental tenants, were won in part by our campaign and representation for our campaign by socialist TDs in the Dáil.

We also spoke at protests organised by Raise the Roof - a housing campaign run by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Sinn Féin. But also involving others on the left.

They held public meetings across the country to promote a protest they had in late 2022. Most of the meetings were chaired by Labour Party reps wearing their union masks. They’d call one protest and then do nothing for 2 whole years - leaving a space for frustration to grow and fertilising the soil for racist division.

At Tathony House we organised in the block and in the local community, knocking doors with the local CATU branch. We organised our own tenant protests while also arguing for Raise the Roof to mobilise the unions more generally on the housing crisis.

We fought in the RTB and consulted Threshold, a good lawyer and our own organisation about the case. We spoke to activists from Cork about resistance to mass eviction in Leeside apartments, we spoke to activists in Dun Laoghaire about resistance to mass eviction at St. Helen’s Court. We studied those cases.

We got a lot of practical advice from Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin O’Broin despite having differences with his party on many issues - particularly the failure of Raise the Roof to mobilise effectively.

It was useful, for example, to know what government funds the council could draw down to purchase Tathony House. We were able to go into meetings with the council informed on what funds were available and offer avenues they could explore.

The council were reluctant to do a survey of tenants and their incomes, for example, in case it looked like a commitment to buy. So O’Broin suggested Threshold do the survey and then pass the anonymous information back to the council. That way they’d know how many were eligible for the housing list and how many for cost rental.

Cllr Melisa Halpin, a People Before Profit rep in Dun Laoghaire, was a big help to us because they’d supported the St.Helen’s Court anti-eviction campaign all the way.

We also fought to get Tathony House into the media. As we’ve already pointed out we wrote press releases with headlines we thought would get attention or get renewed attention. Here are some examples of the headlines we used to get into the press:

“I’d like to ask Leo Varadkar or Michéal Martin where they expect someone to live on €247.50 a week?”

“You feel like you are being torn apart, say Tathony House tenants facing eviction.”

“Cancer patient stressed and desperate as he faces eviction from Tathony House.”

These were just a few from dozens we sent out. We also got coverage after every protest we had. When we wrote the press release ourselves journalists would mostly use it as the basis of an article but when you just took a call from a journalist they’d sometimes use headlines that weren’t great - but you have to expect that.

Fight your landlord by finding out everything you can - especially if they’ve other businesses. Fight in your community, at the council, outside the Dáil, in the RTB, at the courts, in the press. That’s the only way to have a really effective campaign - you have to fight on every front!

THE HOUSING CRISIS

As we write there are close to 14,000 homeless and over 100,000 on various waiting lists. The housing crisis is no accident, it is the result of 40 years of government policy. The country could build homes for the working class in the past - now we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, there’s no excuse!

In 1990, local authorities in Ireland spent the equivalent of just €600 on emergency bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless people for the whole year. The number of families needing emergency accommodation went from just 5 in 1990 to 1,202 in 1999!

Imagine that - when we were building more social housing there were less homeless families. It’s not rocket science. Margaret Thatcher introduced a new economic mantra in 1980s Britain - we now call it “neoliberalism” and it means running down everything public and driving people into the arms of private profiteers.

It’s why our social housing stock was sold off and not replaced. Many working class families understandably fled the estates to buy a home when they had the chance. The state offered “surrender grants” to get workers out of the poorest estates.

But that was part of a plan to turn the social housing estates into underfunded ghettos and more easily demonise the estates and us, the inhabitants. This slander of our working class estates helped justify the sell off of public land to private developers and social housing stock fell.

Now there are 14,000 homeless and the state spent €345 million on emergency accommodation in 2023 alone - all while giving half a billion a year in subsidies to private landlords through the HAP scheme.

Local authority housing output fell by two-thirds in the late 1980s. Combined with the selling off of existing social houses, this meant that the available stock of public housing fell by 15 per cent between 1988 and 1996.

In 2011, the total expenditure by all local authorities on emergency accommodation for homeless families was €73.5 million. Then the State stopped building social housing during austerity. Expenditure on social housing was slashed from €1.7 billion in 2008 to €680 million in 2014, a decline of 60 per cent.

They stepped in to bail out the banks to the tune of €64 billion while housing for workers was undermined. Then they stepped in to bail out the wealthy developers by setting up NAMA, often giving control of a property portfolio back to the developer they bought it off!

It’s taken 40 years to create the worst housing crisis in living memory and it’s roots are in the economic orthodoxy - neoliberalism - that is accepted by all the main parties from Fine Gael and Fiana Fáil to Labour and the far right Irish Freedom Party.

None of them challenge capitalism and it’s the source of our housing crisis.

All the above have pro-market anti-worker economic policies. We have to name the system as the problem and organise to fight it. As long as capitalism exists housing will be treated as a commodity and we will face a crisis. James Connolly wrote about the housing conditions of Dublin workers way back in 1899:

“The housing accommodation of the Dublin workers is a disgrace to the City; high rents and vile sanitary arrangements are the rule, and no one in the Corporation seems to possess courage enough to avow the truth, or to face the storm of obloquy which would be directed upon the head of the councillor who would take the opportunity to expose on the floor of the City Hall the manner in which the interests of house landlords are protected, and the spirit of sanitative legislation set at naught.”

Writing this from a flooded apartment block in Dublin 8 we certainly recognise some of James Connolly’s words. As long as capitalism has existed there has been a housing crisis for the working class. As the socialist Frederick Engels wrote 20 years before Connolly:

“The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class. — What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers “

“The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers’ houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum.”

They could have been writing today! But James Connolly suggested some solutions:

“The taxation of unlet houses would compel the owners of property to accept rents much lower than they now demand, in order to avoid the disagreeable necessity of paying taxes upon unremunerative property. But the erection of houses to be let at cost of construction and maintenance would place in competition with the speculative house landlord, dwellings which, not needing to yield a dividend, could easily beat down his rents”

As did Engels:

“But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage,” given rational utilisation of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses.”

Madeleine acted on their advice. She’s not just a tenant fighting eviction into homelessness for 18 months in Tathony House but as a local councillor in South Dublin County Council she forced the council to compulsory purchase derelict homes and bring them back into use.

Tathony House should have been CPO’d, done up, and turned into social or cost rental housing.

With 166,000 empty homes across Ireland we could start compulsory purchasing derelict homes while massively increasing the social housing build. An increase in social housing brings down rents and private house prices by increasing the supply of homes. Every worker benefits.

This is not about touching a working family’s personal property - that’s a ridiculous slander of socialists. James’ father is a working class soldier from Fatima Mansions flats who broke his back working to eventually buy a little corporation house. Madeleine’s dad worked in a washing machine factory and bought a home.

Socialism is about making life easier for people like them - for people like us. We need to go after the property of the idle rich, bosses and landlords who do nothing except live as parasites on our hard work. Madeleine writes:

“I grew up in Sweden where they built a million homes during the postwar boom. Despite adopting neoliberalism, like every other country, and running down public services, but those million homes have made sure that waiting lists in Sweden are still 2 or 3 years rather than the 14 years people have to wait here.”

Capitalism is about maximising profit. If it’s profitable to destroy the public housing stock they’ll destroy it. We’re not safe from the housing conditions described by Engels, by Connolly and that we face today unless we fight for real democracy and control over the wealth our class, the working class, produces.

We need a state construction company as part of a socialist, democratically planned, economy. The housing crisis is a crisis of capitalism - to end it means challenging that system!

NO DIVISION

“There’s a lot of talk recently about looking after “our own” - but who is “our own” - well I wanna say that a woman from India that works in our hospitals she is “our own!” A construction worker who’s broken his back on construction sites, to build apartment blocks he cannot afford, he is “our own!” My landlord is a rich Irish man and he’s willing to evict families into homelessness, for nothing but money and he is not “our own!””

That was part of a speech James gave at a Raise The Roof protest in November 2022. But the argument about keeping workers united to take on the bosses and the landlords came up within the apartment block too.

At our protest outside the block on April 22nd 2023 one tenant, a Russian guy called Roddy, asked to take the mic. We were suspicious of him because he’d never agreed to help the campaign and told us he didn’t want to share his information with the other tenants.

When we knocked on his door in the months before he’d even defended the landlord!

I looked over his shoulder at his written speech which had the word “immigration” in bold letters over and over. The cheek of a Russian bloke wanting to divert blame from our rich Irish landlord onto other immigrants, tenants fighting eviction.

Facing the mic stood our Indian neighbour Gurpreet and her little girl. Gurpreet worked in James’ Hospital and Roddy was going to tell her to her face and in front of her toddler that she was the problem? A disgraceful attack on a worker. James took the mic back and Roddy ran off like a frightened little rabbit.

It later turned out that Roddy worked for the Iona Institute run Gript website. His agenda was to defend the landlord and divide the tenants using racism. It didn’t work. We didn’t let it.

The Irish landlord was a spoiled little rich boy from Blackrock who refused to take rent supplement or HAP meaning every tenant in Tathony House was a worker. Gurpreet worked shifts in a hospital. Gianluca worked long hours as a chef and was recovering from lung cancer.

There were people in Tathony House who served you food in shops, cleaned the airport, worked security, and got up every morning to work on building sites. One Moldovan man, Vasile, from downstairs had a broken back yet couldn’t afford to take any time off work on building sites.

We are the people who create all the wealth in this society - the working class - and we should not be divided. Division only serves the bosses, the landlords and the political establishment that serves them.

Who benefits? That’s the key question to ask yourself. Who benefits from division in our ranks? Divide and conquer as they say. Do we want to let the bosses and landlords conquer our class? Haven’t they done enough of that over the last 40 years of neoliberalism?

In Tathony House division among the tenants would only help the landlord win. The same goes for any working class strike or protest movement. Working class people are right to be angry - we’re treated like garbage by a landlord government and a capitalist system that works for the bosses and landlords.

But they’re delighted when we blame other workers and poor people and they get to deflect the blame away from a rotten capitalist system. That’s why one of the richest men in the world, Rupert Murdoch, uses his rag newspapers like The Sun to pollute the world with division and hate.

We forget to look up - John Grayken has made €6.5 billion from the housing crisis. He ran Lone Star - a vulture fund. He’s from Texas but bought Irish citizenship. He can come and go as he pleases, do what he wants and suck blood from the working class in the form of a massive rent roll.

We need to fight men like him. Not each other.

But the soft left is to blame too for the humiliation and frustration workers feel: If the Irish Congress of Trade Unions mobilised as many union members as possible on housing, bringing tens of thousands onto the streets, we’d have no opening for far right poison to spread.

We need to call out the union leaders for abandoning workers like those in Tathony House to the stress and trauma of eviction. They have immense social power but refuse to use it. James writes:

“I grew up in Fatima Mansions flats in the 1980s, before moving up to Crumlin. I saw government after government underfund the flats and all working class estates in order to demonise social housing. They created ghettos and then criminalised us.

No brown lad who’s just arrived in Ireland travelled back in time and created a housing crisis 40 years in the making! It’s mad to forget what government after government did to our communities, we can’t let them off the hook!”

A democratically planned economy would be able to provide homes and do a skills survey of all workers who arrive in Ireland and get them contributing and integrated into the workforce immediately. Every pair of hands is a pair of hands that can help build an economy that serves all of us who call this island home.

WHY WE FOUGHT

James says: “When I got the eviction notice I was worried about my future but I was also furious. I’d paid this landlord tens of thousands and yet was going to end up homeless. I knew I had to fight. I also had to defend my neighbours. I was willing to get torn out of the building by bailiffs because by taking such a strong stand it made my neighbours feel more secure!”

James O’Toole and Madeleine Johansson are members of the “Red Network” of People Before Profit. We are inspired to fight on, no matter what, because we fight for a working class revolution. We believe in our class.

While dealing with the stress of eviction we also wrote books - Madeleine wrote on Sweden, James on the Guards. We attended meetings, organised local protests for Palestine. During the local elections in 2024 Madeleine came home with blood on her socks from canvassing every day.

You can’t keep going like that unless you are inspired by a vision of a better world - a world where workers call the shots and no one ever suffers the stress of eviction or homelessness.

The Irish state has served the interests of bosses and landlords for over 100 years and you cannot simply run that machine and think it will do any different. Governments under capitalism are subordinate to the market and can do 1 of 3 things: adopt policies that make things worse, make things better, or do nothing.

Obviously we want to see Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael go. They’ve made the housing crisis worse with their policies. We’d like to see a government that improves life for our class. But a Sinn Féin led “left government” won’t take on the market - they’d at best make things slightly better.

Let’s take that but fight for far more.

In Finland they had a great “Housing First” policy that took people out of homelessness as a priority without asking about other problems. They planned to eliminate homelessness by 2027 but now have abandoned that target - why? Private landlords still control the rental market.

Landlords don’t care about homeless workers. They raise rents. More people become homeless. The target date for eliminating homelessness got pushed back. If capitalists and landlords still control the economy you are swimming against the tide.

And the fundamental economic approach of our time - neoliberalism - isn’t just a policy. It’s about a system that has faced a crisis of profitability since the postwar boom and attacks workers to recover their profits. They feel they have to pursue those policies.

That’s why the Red Network says kick out Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but let’s put socialist TDs in a strong position to discipline an unreliable Sinn Féin. You could support a Sinn Féin left government externally and case by case to make sure they delivered as much as possible.

The alternative is to join a government that would include soft “left” parties like Labour and the Soc Dems or even the middle class Greens and have your voice, the working class voice, suffocated and then you end up sharing in the blame when they inevitably let people down.

In that situation an even more emboldened far right would grow.

We need a new working class left that’s willing to do the hard work of fighting evictions, fighting for our communities and for the working class as a whole while using that hard won reputation and authority to argue for socialism.

We need to raise our sights and aim for a world where no one faces homelessness. The Red Network believes that workers who understand the need for socialism should unite in an organisation and seek to “lead to empower” other workers - so that they then do the same.

By taking a stand at Tathony House we got messages from tenants all over the country inspired by what we had done. By taking a lead you can empower others to fight back. There’s not enough working class socialists across the country though and we need far more.

There’s a lot of hard work ahead. Take a lead in your apartment block, your community but most importantly in your workplace and let’s fight for a better life for all workers. We need you. Join us.

www.rednetwork.net

Useful contacts:

Threshold Freephone Helpline 1800 454 454

People Before Profit TDs and Cllrs are at www.pbp.ie/people/

If you have questions about the Tenant In Situ scheme contact the Housing Agency at tenantinsitu@housingagency.ie

Tenant union CATU are here https://catuireland.org/

The Residential Tenancies Board is here https://www.rtb.ie/ or call 0818 30 30 37 or 01 702 8100