A short report on the Dublin Community Land Trust Conference 2015

By Pat Conaty:

The Dublin CLT conference last week really engaged everyone in the room including the leading housing policy expert in Ireland, Rory O’Donnell. His presentation was masterful and echoed the other ones.

Architects, planners, grassroots people, politicians from Dublin and elsewhere were all in the room. We were linking up last week commons and CLTs and thinking on a garden city scale for transformative ways forward.

Emer O’Siochru is a community architect and longstanding land reformer in Ireland. She organised the conference with RIAI, the national architect’s trade body and the Urban Forum (which brings together planners, landscape designers, building engineers and other housing professionals). The big opportunity here is that the event and ideas impressed the oppositional politicians in Ireland. There were folk from Northern Ireland who came down for the day from Belfast also. They found it all very compelling.

Emer will be circulating the four presentations before long. I do not have them all. It would be good if this could be written up but that would be a project in its own right and resources to build a movement for CLTs and co-op housing needs to be sourced as a priority.

I and others have been working on a report on Co-operative Land Banks that Co-operatives UK has agreed to publish.
Some of the speakers at the Dublin conference have made contributions to this. Shann Turnbull is doing patient work editing this report and I hope we can use some of the slides from Dublin to put into the report.”