IRSP activists from the Beechmount/Mid-Falls area of Belfast identified empty properties in the area as part of the ongoing IRSP Housing campaign. Literally thousands of families and single people are on housing waiting lists, factually homeless and living in hostel accommodation or substandard properties owned by a string of privateer landlords.
The need for decent affordable and public housing is ignored. Meanwhile billions of pounds and euros are spent on the age-old distractions of ‘bread and circuses’ such as the Olympic games and ‘jubilee’ celebrations for the super-rich inbred ancestor of England’s most prolific robber-barons. To add insult to injury, we are to witness the obscenity of ‘royal visits’ to Ireland where their close relative, Victoria the ‘Famine Queen’, oversaw a Malthusian genocide of an impoverished Irish proletariat and the forced emigration of millions of Irish working-class people.
While these Imperialist ‘circuses’ are spun as progress, in the mirage of ‘an Ireland of equals’, 5,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets of our country, 100,000 families are on housing waiting lists, yet there are 350,000 empty properties! The Irish Republican Socialist Party will have no hesitation in highlighting this scandal, as in the words of our party’s co-founder, Seamus Costello, “we owe our allegiance to the working-class”, not property developers or private landlords. As to the obscenity of homelessness while ‘Republicans’ consider bending the knee to the figure head of British imperialism, the IRSP adhere to James Connolly’s words proclaimed at Liberty Hall over a century ago:
“We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland”
