Create News 31 – The Power of the Arts in Enacting Social Change

John Bissett is a community worker who lives and works in Dublin. John has been involved with a broad range of social movements working to effect positive change and to challenge the imposition of policies and actions which dominate and inflict suffering across the social body. He has been involved with grassroots youth and community work in the city of Dublin since the late 1980s. This has led to participation and leadership in many groups and social movements over the past four decades in Ireland, Australia and with groups across Europe. John is currently a member of Housing Action Now and Red Wheelbarrow Productions.

John is currently preparing a book for publication about the lives and struggles of public housing tenants, titled ‘It’s not where you live. It’s how you live’ to be out before the end of 2022. In this piece, John writes about the long history of arts and activism, focusing in particular on his working base of Rialto, Inchicore and Bluebell, in Dublin’s south inner city.