Hey everyone!

We would like to invite everybody to Squat City on Saturday for our first open day since the reoccupation. Between 1pm and 5pm, everybody is welcome through the side gate on Lower Grangegorman, whether they know us already or not!

We’ll be serving food and showing people around the space and answering any questions they have. We’re also very interested to hear ideas that people have for the space. We hope to soon set up some sort of collective structure that makes it easy for non-squatter non-residents to get involved in the space, as well as reaching out to community and activist groups that could use the space1, but we won’t have this in place for Saturday. The purpose of our open day on Saturday isn’t necessarily to get loads of new people involved in the space (yet), it’s simply to re-introduce ourselves to our neighbours and remind everybody what’s possible.

Reality

In the collective unconscious of our society, the police are the ultimate bastion of reality, the force that ensures that things stay the way they are; taking them on and winning, however temporarily, shows that reality is negotiable. Seven Myths about the Police — CrimethInc.

We know that Squat City / Grangegorman was a very special place for a lot of people. Especially after the eviction attempt in March last year, and the previous occupants’ successful resistance to it, it became a symbol for something much bigger than itself. It gave hope to so many people and reminded us that the power of the ruling class and their accomplices, the police, is not absolute after all.

However, in the end, the previous occupants were taken to court, and after fighting the case for months, they ultimately lost2. Morale was low, and tensions high, and any appetite for further resistence that may have been there at one point had been depleted. The moral of the story was clear: “You had your fun, but now justice has prevailed. The rightful owner has their property back, and now it will be sold so it can be developed into something proper. Your squatty bullshit is over. There’s no point trying to fight us because we’ll always win in the end.”

They had it all sewn up. They boarded up all the houses. They razor-wired all the fences. They painted over all the graffiti. They got security to occupy the place 24/7. It was over, it was time to move on. When it was sold in the end, there was no mention of it having ever been the centre of Dublin’s squatting movement, or a symbol of resistance for a whole city. It was like it never happened.

But lest you doubt that it ever happened, come to the open day on Saturday. We want to show you that it is indeed all real. We want to rekindle the flame that was lit last March. We want to introduce ourselves to our neighbours and show them the space that was so dear to them before, that they feared they would never see again. Once again there is a giant gaping hole in the fabric of consensus reality. Squat City lives! …and now it’s reality who has to negotiate with us.

Footnotes