With 15,000 homeless in Ireland, it’s a hard argument to justify the 14,500 currently vacant properties across Dublin. Is it time to reconsider Ireland’s strict squatting rights? Throughout the 1980s, a vacant and deteriorating block of flats in Manchester known as the Hulme Crescents became a centre for squatters. My Dad, Gary, was one of those people, and I sat down to speak to him about his experiences.
In February 2025, it was revealed that homelessness figures in Ireland had surpassed another record high, with 15,286 homeless or living in emergency accommodation, 4,603 of which were children.
Also in February 2025, it was revealed that more than 14,500 properties lay vacant across Dublin alone, 4,000 of them in the city centre. A fifth of them had been vacant for more than four years.
With such high rates of homelessness continuing on an upward trajectory, and so many homes and commercial properties sitting vacant for years, there was understandable anger. There is a desire to fill the empty buildings, to offer a purpose to the currently dejected spaces.
Sunnyvale or ‘That Social Centre’ is a recent example of a group taking action, squatting one of these vacant properties in Stoneybatter to set up a community organisation, bike fixing workshops, and ultimately, homes, in September 2021. They were evicted by the gardaí just a month later.
In Ireland, squatters rights, or ‘adverse possession’, is when a third party occupies property owned by another, be it land or a building, commercial or private property. If you have occupied the property continuously for 12 years (or 30 years where the property is owned by the Irish State), you can claim adverse possession. Of course, generally landlords or the state will evict you when they are notified of your presence.
Despite attempts by Sunnyvale to regroup and relocate, squatting is purposefully extremely difficult in Ireland, and has arguably never truly existed here as a cultural movement.
However, in England in the 1980s, a huge housing estate in Hulme, Manchester became a centre for squatters, and was largely tolerated by the city council and police. The estate was known as the Hulme Crescents; built in the 1970s, they consisted of thirteen tower blocks of over 5,000 flats, in four crescent shapes.
My Dad, let’s call him Gary, lived in the Hulme Crescents from 1984 to 1993, witnessing their rise and fall. He tells me how for many, squatting offered a roof over a head, and a community for hundreds of people in the Crescents, though it was often far from glamorous.
Knowing friends in the area already, and in need of a place to live, Gary moved into a flat with four friends in the Crescents and signed onto the dole, which paid their rent. He describes the residents of the Hulme Crescents at the time he moved in as “a mixture of students, families, creatives... generally just a big housing estate”, mostly still full of renters, with just a handful of people squatting.
Nobody ever got evicted, [the council] just stopped maintaining it. They started boarding up the flats so nobody could get in, but people still did.
Throughout his time in the Crescents, Gary would live in about seven or eight different flats, moving as friends came and left. Fundamental problems with the buildings soon became evident, and it gradually became a place for people with nowhere else to live. Like many of the people living there, he started squatting; it became the norm in the Crescents.
Despite the council no longer renting out the flats, they continued to maintain the water and electricity supply. Gary tells me that “Nobody ever got evicted, [the council] just stopped maintaining it. They started boarding up the flats so nobody could get in, but people still did.” He says all you had to do was “put a wire in the electric meter, and pay some electric to hope they didn’t come and cut you off.”
For the most part, Gary says “people did what they wanted” in the Crescents. A wave of artists, musicians, and creatives moved in and set up studios, with names who would later make it big often visiting the music studios and underground culture.
Gary asserts “There were a lot of famous bands that would say they lived there but they didn't really live there... They visited.” Mick Hucknall from Simply Red, Nico from the Velvet Underground, and the Stone Roses all visited in their time, though he confirms Mike Joyce from the Smiths really did live there for a while.
“There was a place called the Kitchen, people would come in out of the rest of Manchester into the Crescents to go to the sort of ravey things that were going on. It was the early days of rave, I suppose, the late 80s, early 90s. So people would come into that. [...] If you were a band, you could set up in a flat and rehearse there. It was a 24 hour place really.”
“There was definitely community. There was people there for different reasons, people into music, or who had run away from home, some people were 17, 18 right up to people in their 40s and 50s. [...] You wouldn't necessarily know everyone well, but everyone knew someone.”
It was still quite a scary place sometimes, living there. We ended up with someone knocking on our door, and whispering through the letterbox.
He says despite the squatting and some of the problems associated with the people who lived there, the “Police didn’t come in. [...] I think it was just, they couldn't be bothered coming in. It wasn't worth them going in to bust people for small amounts of drugs, and not having electrics... there’s probably a hundred people all with the same mindset living there. There’s not a lot they could have done. They were probably happy to just ignore it.”
Gary describes the Hulme Crescents as “an anarchist haven in the middle of Manchester”, but he firmly asserts it wasn’t all good. He thinks sometimes people remember the Crescents through “rose-tinted glasses”.
“It was still quite a scary place sometimes, living there. We ended up with someone knocking on our door, and whispering through the letterbox.”
“There wasn’t a lot of violence, but on occasion some drug dealing. [...] If they didn't live there, people would come over and there was some muggings, and a bit of violence, you wouldn’t always feel safe at night walking around, [you’d be] nervous if you were on your own.”
He recounts a story to me of walking home to his flat one day, when a man suddenly approached him. He says the man asked him if he carried a knife, to which Gary replied he did not. The man then pulled out his own knife, and asked Gary to take him back to his flat and give him a drink; “He wasn’t really asking”, he says. Luckily, Gary had just moved to a newer flat in the Crescents, “my old flat had basically got boarded up and the fuses taken out, but I still had keys to get into it.” He showed him into the old flat, which just had a mattress on the floor, and the man said ‘oh, you live here?’. Gary says he told him ‘it was all he had’, and the man shrugged and left him alone. He says he shut the door, and waited in his old flat for about half an hour before he left to continue his way back home.
He recalls another occasion where “We all went away somewhere, and when we came back, everything in the flat was gone. They’d stolen everything. We moved out of the Crescents for a bit, not far away, and over the next few years it went downhill, the families left, and eventually else everyone left.”
Gary tells me how “there were a lot of people who were struggling with their mental health” living in the Crescents, but he says “they were understood as long as they didn't do anything unpleasant to people, they were looked after in a way.”
One thing that came out of the creatives of the Hulme Crescents was a performance arts collective called Dogs of Heaven. Gary worked with them, building large scale art installations such as a Wickerman they would set on fire in Glastonbury in 1992.
By 1993, Gary says the council mostly viewed the Hulme Crescents as a “nightmare”, the buildings falling increasingly into disrepair. A demolition order for the Hulme Crescents was passed, and most people left willingly. Gary and the rest of Dogs of Heaven put on a demolition show to give to Crescents one final goodbye, with over 1,000 people attending.
The show was one of huge puppets, fire, and cars thrown from the roofs of the flats, and a soundtrack of collected memories: “We did a thing going in to ask people about how they felt, what their time in the Crescents was like, to play over the demolition show. Me and my friend Dan went in one house, and it was a little old couple in a little 1950s style house, with proper wallpaper and sideboards... they'd just lived through this anarchist era, and there was this little homely couple in the middle of all this darkness, and we said ‘how can you still be living here?’, they said ‘Oh, we like it!’”
Squatting, as a lifestyle, was possible in Hulme in the 1980s because the buildings weren’t up to the standard they should have been, and they weren’t serviceable. However, it also wasn’t illegal in the United Kingdom at the time. It is now.
I think if people are homeless, and there are homes not being lived in, surely it's better to have people not sleeping on the streets?
Reflecting, Gary says they were “living in a city in a place where people had a little bit of freedom to live how they wanted to live, instead of living how they were supposed to live.” He describes the community there as “people all who have the same ethos. Nobody goes hungry, nobody sits on their own all day.”
He doesn’t squat anymore, he doesn’t need to, but he does comment on the changes to squatters’ rights since his day: “I think there’s a lot of homeless people on the streets. And I think there’s a lot of empty buildings. I think if people are homeless, and there are homes not being lived in, surely it's better to have people not sleeping on the streets?”