Securing Possession of the Home in the COVID-19 Context: The Irish Experience

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has prompted reflection and at times radical legislative action in a range of jurisdictions to help individuals to retain possession of their homes despite the economic challenges created by the crisis. Long-term lock-downs in the interests of public health have created the need to minimise the movement of people and have resulted in significant loss of income, prompting legislatures to enact reforms to avoid evictions that had previously been perceived as ‘off the table’ due to their impact on property rights. The legal and political parameters for balancing the rights of landlords and tenants appear to have been re-drawn (at least temporarily) by the public health crisis. This draft chapter analyses the Irish legislative response to the impact of COVID-19 on tenants in light of these themes, with a particular focus on the interaction between legislation and constitutional constraints in this context, and on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on political understandings of those constraints.

Keywords: Property Law, Property Theory, Constitutional Law, Housing Law