THE GOVERNMENT ATTRACTED criticism from opposition politicians and housing and homelessness charities this week after announcing that it would not extend an effective ban on evictions.
The “temporary eviction moratorium” was announced last autumn and came into effect on 31 October; it is due to expire on 31 March at the end of the six-month “winter emergency period”.
Under the ban, notices to quit issued over the six-month period have been deferred until the end of March, postponing the ability for private rental tenancies to be terminated.
While notices to quit can still be issued to tenants while the ban is in effect, they will not be able to be evicted until after the ban ends, except in some circumstances (including when a tenant breaches a rental agreement or does not uphold their responsibilities).
The Government announced on Tuesday that the ban would be lifted at the end of this month, despite calls from housing charities and all of the main opposition parties for the moratorium to be extended.
Both Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar justified getting rid of the ban by saying that it did not help to reduce the number of people becoming homeless, and that it was driving landlords out of the private rental sector, which in turn reduced the number of properties available to rent and drove up prices.
Despite the ban being in place for almost five months, the numbers of people entering homelessness each month has continued to rise, reaching record levels of 11,754 people in January.
However, housing and homelessness charities have contradicted the claim that the ban isn’t working, saying that it has been effective at keeping families out of homelessness.
So what has been the impact of the ban overall?
Speaking during Leaders’ Questions on Tuesday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar gave three reasons for not continuing with the ban on evictions.
First, he said the ban “was not effective in reducing homelessness”.
“The number of homeless people being provided with emergency accommodation by the State increased every month for which the moratorium was in place,” Varadkar told the Dáil.
Second, the Taoiseach said that people were unable to move themselves or their children back into a property they owned as a result of the ban, “creating a new form of homelessness”.
Finally, Varadkar said that extending the ban further would have reduced the number of properties available to lease and driven up rents by discouraging new landlords from entering the private rental market. He claimed:
We have lost 40,000 [landlords] in the past five years and it may have caused, once extended, more and more landlords to leave.
Varadkar’s statements were echoed by Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien. Speaking to reporters after a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, O’Brien said that the ban “has not had the impact of reducing homelessness numbers”.
Appearing later on RTÉ’s Prime Time, the minister also claimed he could guarantee that there would not be a short-term rise in homelessness as a result of the lifting of the ban.
He also said that he had lifted the ban because, in his view, “a further intervention in the private rental sector will lead to further reduction in the capacity in that sector”.
O’Brien said that this view was “based on our own research, based also on… a number of factors within that”.
The Government’s decision not to extend the ban was welcomed by the Irish Property Owners’ Association (IPOA), the representative body for landlords.
The IPOA was strongly against the introduction of the ban back in October. The group threatened legal action at the time, saying that it breached landlords’ constitutional rights.
In a statement this week, Mary Conway, chair of the IPOA said that the eviction ban was “always an inadequate policy response”.
“The Government has already introduced four versions of it over the past number of years and it has had no discernible impact whatsoever on homelessness figures – in fact the opposite is true,” she said.
In an attempt to gauge the effectiveness of the ban, The Journal contacted the Department of Housing and the Department of An Taoiseach seeking figures to back up the statements made by Varadkar and O’Brien; as part of our queries, we also sought access to the “research” referenced by O’Brien.
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing referenced research carried out by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) last year. The research is due to be published later this year, but some preliminary results were given to the department ahead of this. The department cited results which found that:
The spokesperson also referred to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Residential Property Market Monitor for 2023, which found that 78% of agents surveyed are of the view that within the next two years second hand rental stock that has left the market will not be replaced.
Finally, the spokesperson said that a review by property firm Sherry Fitzgerald found that there was about a 13,500 loss in rental property stock from the market last year, and that “regulation of the sector” was a contributing factor to landlord’s decisions to leave the market.
“Investors view the current regulation of the rental sector as complex and ever-changing,” the spokesperson said.
We also attempted to independently verify Varadkar’s claim about the eviction ban causing a “new form of homelessness”; however, we could find no available figures outlining the exact number of homeowners who are currently unable to move back into their own properties.
Monthly homelessness figures released by the Department of Housing, or reports from the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE), do not capture this sort of data.
However, a spokesperson for Department of Housing told TheJournal that in the past number of months the minister had received correspondence from the public “citing a difficulty with the winter emergency period, where they cannot take back their property for their own or a family members use”.
Also, in December the Irish Times highlighted the case of a property owner who could not move back into her own home as a result of the eviction ban.
In calling for the ban to be extended, opposition TDs and housing charities said special exemptions should be included to protect property owners in this particular situation.
TheJournal also sought from the IPOA in relation to its claims that the eviction ban “has had no discernible impact whatsoever on homelessness figures”, but the group said it would not be commenting beyond its initial statement.
Both the Government and IPOA’s statements about the perceived effectiveness of the ban have been roundly rejected by a number of housing and homelessness charities.
Threshold, the Dublin Simon Community, and Focus Ireland all spoke to The Journal over the past week and each strongly contested the Government’s claims.
Focus Ireland and Threshold have stated that the number of families entering homelessness would have been much higher if the eviction ban wasn’t in place.
Wayne Stanley, the Executive Director of the Simon Communities of Ireland, said that the ending of the moratorium is “very worrying” because while “people still became homeless when the eviction ban was in place, it absolutely prevented homelessness”.
The Government’s central point about the eviction ban not being effective at reducing the numbers of homeless people has proven by far the most contentious.
There have been a number of bans on evicting tenants from rental properties implemented over the past three years, all of them introduced since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On 19 March 2020, the Government announced a series of measures to protect tenants being evicted while lockdowns were in place. Among these was a “moratorium on notices to leave rental accommodation”.
This lasted from the end of March that year until 1 August 2020, when it was replaced by laws that allowed for evictions, but which aimed to protect those most affected by the Covid-19 crisis.
Those laws also allowed for the reintroduction of an eviction ban in times of emergency caused by the virus.
A second blanket ban on evictions was brought in on 22 October 2020, as the country entered a second lockdown under Level 5 restrictions as a result of an upsurge in cases.
That ban was due to last until January 2021, but was extended to 12 April 2021, when the emergency period ended (after a third lockdown was introduced following an upsurge in cases over Christmas 2020).
During the periods these bans were in place, there was a clear drop in the number of homeless people in Ireland, which led many to conclude they had been successful.
Figures compiled by Focus Ireland show that over the course of the three eviction bans (which began at the start of Covid lockdowns in Ireland), the number of homeless people fell almost 20%, from 9,907 in March 2020 to 7,991 in May the following year, just after the last Covid-era ban was lifted.
The number of homeless children fell by a third (from 3,355 to 2,148) in this same period.
Since May 2021, however, as most of the emergency measures were lifted and Ireland returned to normal, homelessness figures started to rise again almost every month.
By October 2022, there were 11,397 people living in homeless accommodation in Ireland. This included 7,917 adults and 3,480 children. At that stage, the number of homeless children had risen by over 60% since the last eviction ban was lifted in April 2021.
Responding to the growing crisis, the Government brought forward new emergency laws to implement the current eviction ban (due to expire at the end of March).
Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien specifically said the ban was being introduced due to the “severe pressure” on emergency accommodation across the country.
“We want to make sure that we can protect tenancies through these winter months and whilst also respecting fully the rights of the property owners,” he said at the time.
However, unlike the previous bans, homelessness continued to rise following the introduction of the new laws, reaching record levels once again in January (the latest month for which figures are available).
Figures for October of last year (which were taken before the ban came into effect) show that there was a total of 11,397 homeless people in Ireland. This rose by 145 people in November, and 90 in December. By January the number of homeless people was at 11,754, the highest number on record.
Senior Government figures have repeatedly emphasised that the ban has not worked to reduce homelessness as justification for not continuing with the eviction moratorium beyond March.
But while they may be right about the figures, Focus Ireland and Threshold both dispute the suggestion that the ban wasn’t effective.
“What an eviction ban can do is it can reduce the number of households going into homelessness compared to what it otherwise would be, and I think the evidence is overwhelming that it did do that,” said Mike Allen, director of advocacy with Focus Ireland.
The number of households entering homelessness would have been higher, and particularly families.
John-Mark McCafferty said that had there not been an eviction ban, the homelessness figures would have been worse.
“I think it’s opportunistic and it’s disingenuous for people to say the eviction ban didn’t work simply because the numbers didn’t go up,” he said.
You have to look at the counter-factual, what would have happened if there was no eviction ban? It would have been even worse.
It’s impossible to fully verify the above claims, as we cannot account for what would or would not have happened in the hypothetical scenario in which the eviction ban was not in place.
However, monthly homelessness figures show a notable change in pattern from the introduction of the eviction ban in October 2022.
In the three months to October, the number of homeless people (including families and children) rose steadily.
In July, there were 1,423 homeless families in Ireland, including 3,137 children. This increased to 1,483 families (an increase of 60) with 3,220 children (an increase of 83) in August.
By October, the number was at 1,601 families with 3,480 children – an increase of 178 families and 343 children in the three months from July.
But in November – the first full month during which the ban was in place – the number of homeless families increased by just 15, with homeless children going up by just 14 (compared to increases of 60 families and 83 children between July and August).
To compare to the same period last year, between October and November 2021 the number of homeless families increased by 26, with homeless children going up by 35.
In December of this year, the number of homeless families actually dropped by 12, with a reduction of 52 in the number of homeless children. This compares with a drop in families of 31 in the previous year, and a reduction of 97 homeless children.
(It’s worth noting that December is normally an outlier for homelessness figures, with the number generally dropping for a variety of reasons related to the Christmas period)
In January, the number of homeless families rose by 15, but the number of homeless children dropped again by 11. This compares with a jump of 42 families in the same period last year, and a rise of 112 children.
Single adults
The ban had less of an effect on the number of single adults entering homelessness, however, which continued to rise, from 7,917 in October, to 8,323 in January.
This increase contributed to an overall rise in the number of homeless people in the country over those months.
However, as Focus Ireland points out, the original Covid-era eviction ban similarly had little effect on homeless single adults, with the numbers staying more or less the same as when it was first introduced.
This is because homeless single adults have more complex issues and pathways into and out of homelessness. In contrast, one of the main reasons that families become homeless is because of a lack of available accommodation.
What’s more, while both the current ban and the Covid-19 eviction saw reductions in the number of people entering homelessness, the period of the Covid-19 ban saw an increase in people actually leaving homelessness.
This was as a result of more social housing being allocated to homeless households, and an increase in available accommodation after the collapse of tourism caused landlords to shift from short-term holiday lets to long-term accommodation.
However, no such increase in exits happened this time round, meaning that overall numbers in emergency accommodation increased even as significantly fewer families and children entered homelessness.
In announcing the eviction ban back in October, Minister O’Brien said specifically it was about protecting tenancies, rather than reducing the number of people in homelessness.
“We want to make sure that we can protect tenancies through these winter months whilst also respecting fully the rights of the property owners,” he told RTÉ radio at the time.
Despite the minister saying this week that the ban “has not had the impact of reducing homelessness numbers”, that was not the stated aim of it at the time.
“[The eviction ban] did exactly what you would expect it to do, and did it very well,” said Mike Allen.
“They seem to have expected that it would have the same effect as the Covid one, in other words not just reduce the flow into homelessness, but actually reduce the number of people who are homeless, particularly the families.
But in order to do that you would have had to have the same impact of boosting the exits form homelessness, and there were no measures to do that and the circumstances didn’t allow that to happen.
Separately, however, is the issue cited by the Government about the departure of landlords from the market as a result of the ban.
Figures from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) do suggest that this has been occurring in recent years.
According to the RTB, there were 43,599 fewer lease agreements registered in 2021 compared to 2016, which points towards a reduction in the number of landlords operating in the market over that time period.
The IPOA and the Government have said that continuing the eviction ban would increase the number of landlords leaving the market; however, it is hard to gauge this one way or another and there are no figures that suggest this will necessarily be the case.
The RTB conducted a survey of 100 departed landlords in November of last year, and found that their main reasons for leaving the market were high taxes, low profitability and an overly stringent regulatory environment.
It should be noted that this survey was only carried out a month into the ban and with a small sample size – it is possible that landlords feel differently now, and that a larger sample size may produce different results.
Housing charity Threshold conceded that prolonging the ban does have a negative impact on sentiment among smaller landlords.
“We are alive to the negative impact of an eviction ban extension,” said CEO John-Mark McCafferty, though he added that, on balance, keeping the ban in place was “the least-worst option”.
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