The Rent Strike is a documentary that tells the story of a pivotal event in Irish working class history
Between 1970 and 1973 over 350,000 tenants throughout Ireland withheld rent in protest against rent increases, poor housing conditions and a lack of facilities. The story of this national movement, which ended in success in August 1973, is told for the first time in a new documentary, The Rent Strike, using RTÉ archive footage and interviews with surviving strikers and their families.
From the late 60s, anger over these housing issues led to an upsurge of rent strikes beginning in Ballyphehane in Cork and Ballymun in Dublin in March 1970. Over the next two years the tenants’ campaign, coordinated by the National Association of Tenants Organisations (NATO), spread throughout the country. The strength of the movement led to a deal being negotiated between NATO and the Fine Gael – Labour coalition government in August 1973, who capitulated to all the tenants’ demands.
The Rent Strike celebrates the inspiring story of this working-class campaign, with a particular spotlight on the women who led the pickets and protests every day across the country. It documents the migration from the country’s collapsing tenement housing, life in Ireland’s first mass suburbs, and the harm caused by faulty constructions through the National Building Agency (where one pregnant woman in Cork lost her child due to a boiler explosion). The documentary chronicles the day-to-day work needed to sustain the strikes, how strikers found unlikely allies in council staff, where the IRA played an unofficial part and how organised communities fought the councils, the Gardaí and the government, and won.
