Produced by Azzy O’Connor, Fiadh Tubridy and Declan Mallon, The Rent Strike (2024) documentary was shown in the Irish Film Institute in August. Screening across Ireland are being scheduled at the moment, with a growing public interest across all generations.
The Rent Strike uses archive footage, newspaper articles, personal archives and, most importantly, the testimonies of the participants, to reconstruct the timeline of the early 1970s rent strike in Ireland. An episode in working class history that has been actively suppressed from collective memory, the rent strike was a successful test for the tenants resisting council measures of rent increases in subpar living conditions. Organising locally and nationally through the National Association of Tenants’ Organisations (NATO), the tenants successfully held the line, resisted evictions, defied the state and the Gardaí, and had their demands met.
This mass mobilisation of the working class is well contextualised in the film through an analysis of the conditions people found themselves in early ’70s. The film explores the political and class consciousness of the participants in the strike with grace and tact. In particular, it captures the role of women in the strike very well, and the selection of speakers is rather diverse and representative of the strike demographics. Visually and sound-wise, the documentary is well-made. Oftentimes we are ready to let some issues with filmmaking slip if we find the topic particularly interesting or previously unexplored: while the topic of The Rent Strike would definitely fall within that category, there are no issues we need to ignore.
The Rent Strike tells a story and serves as an important document in the history of Irish struggle for dignified living conditions accessible to all. In discussions around the housing activism in Ireland, it has already become a point of reference—the recent Connolly Conversations event on housing had two of the speakers reminding the audience of specific aspects of the 70s rent strike, as seen on the big screen.
While the documentary correctly avoids to draw parallels between the current moment in housing and that of the seventies, it is only natural for the viewers in 2024 to reflect on the similarities and the differences: what, if anything, could make a rent strike successful now? How does financialised housing sector of today compare to the council housing of the past? It is not coincidental that this documentary is the result of research conducted by members of CATU, the Community Action Tenants Union. Founded in 2019, CATU builds upon a dynamic and continuous tradition of housing organisations in Ireland—and that tradition very much includes NATO as an important demonstration of mass organising. The audience of The Rent Strike at the IFI screening, the preview at Liberty Hall, and screenings across the country represents well the continuum between NATO and CATU: from seasoned community organisers to the new generation of student organisers, they all find both information and inspiration in the film and in the conversations that follow. The Rent Strike screenings are a social event that goes beyond merely watching a film.
Finally, the analysis of the cause, course, and aftermath of the rent strike presented in the documentary is superb: avoiding the pitfalls of excessive praise and defeatism alike, the results of the strike are assessed realistically and correctly linked to events that would follow, with the sale of the public housing stock and the neoliberal turn of the state. It is not easy to offer a nuanced, serious perspective on large-scale events, especially in a piece which is the first attempt to tell a story after 50 years. Nevertheless, The Rent Strike succeeds at that.
The Rent Strike is on tour of Ireland at the moment, with new screenings announced at https://catuireland.org/documentary/ . A written publication documenting the relevant research, Rent Strike 1970-1973: Reclaiming the History of Irish Tenants’ Struggles by Fiadh Tubridy is available from Connolly Books, Temple Bar, Dublin – https://www.connollybooks.org/product/rent-strike-1970-73-reclaiming-the-history-of-irish-tenants-struggles
