As Dublin City Council restarts buying second-hand homes to tackle homelessness, who will be prioritised?

Dublin City Council is restarting its programmes for buying up second-hand homes to tackle homelessness – but there will be a shift in focus, said Dublin City Council’s housing manager, Mick Mulhern, on Monday.

The council had paused purchases early this year, when its €95m funding from the department ran out, after it had to finance homes it had already agreed on last year from this year's budget. 

Councillors across the political divide agreed to a Sinn Féin emergency motion calling on the government to fund the council to continue to buy second-hand homes for families with notices to quit, known as tenant-in-situ purchases. 

The scheme was “an essential tool in the toolbox of this City Council in preventing hundreds and hundreds of families slipping into the deeply traumatic journey of homelessness”, said Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan, at the full council meeting in March. 

More recently, the government announced additional funding to get second-hand acquisitions – including tenant-in-situ – moving again, in Fingal, and in Dublin city.

On Wednesday, Fianna Fail Minister for Housing James Browne said that he was granting €50 million more to councils to spend on second-hand homes this year – with €22 million of that for Dublin City Council. 

As well as that, officials in his department have also said that the council can start to dip into next year’s budget of €28.5 million to make deals for homes that will come through then. 

But there are a few approaches that the council has to buying second-hand homes, and debate at the Dublin City Council housing committee was centered on how to focus the spending.

On Monday, Mulhern said that the council going forward should focus mainly on buying existing homes for some of the 223 homeless families on the housing list who’ve been stuck in emergency accommodation for more than two years.

There will be less of a focus on buying homes for families at risk of homelessness because their landlord is planning to sell up, through the tenant in situ scheme, Mulhern said.

And any purchases under tenant in situ will be more targeted than before, Mulhern said. “Tenant-in-situ acquisitions are for people who would have absolutely become homeless.”

Mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE), said similar.  

Going forward, council staff will try to find other options for tenants before looking at tenant-in situ, said Hayes. And DRHE may prioritise households for the tenant-in-situ scheme who they would struggle to accommodate in homeless services, she said. 

At the meeting, councillors said that they didn’t quite know what to tell constituents with notices to quit now, about whether the council would buy the home from their landlord via the tenant-in-situ scheme or not. 

The stop-start and uncertainty surrounding the tenant-in-situ scheme over the past months has had an impact. Some of those who had missed out on the scheme this year are now homeless, said Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, at the meeting.

“Every report has said that keeping people in their home is a priority of breaking the cycle of homelessness,” said Doolan –  rather than waiting until they are homeless to try to help them get back out again.

Even as the government and council refocus away from the tenant in situ scheme aimed at keeping tenants in their homes, there are more pressures than ever pushing some out towards homelessness.

Notices to quit are up by 6 percent in Dublin in the first half of this year, compared to the first half of last year, show Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) figures released Tuesday.

Dipping into next year

On 12 August, David Dalton, a principal officer in the Department of Housing, wrote to say that Dublin City Council can start buying second-hand homes by dipping into €28.5 million of next year’s budget.

“At least now we’re in a good space where we can start to acquire properties that will probably close in 2026,” said Ruth Dowling, council executive manager at the meeting. 

Councillors in Fingal heard this week that their council too can dip into next year’s pot of money, with €6 million more to buy second-hand homes. 

Dowling said that Dublin City Council and the Department of Housing want to focus on buying homes for families stuck long-term in homeless accommodation, out of the budget for buying second-hand homes.

There are 781 families in homeless accommodation who are on the Dublin City Council social housing list, she said. 

Of those, 223 families have been in emergency accommodation for more than two years, she said. 

Dowling said that 82 percent of long-term homeless families are big families but the council has few four-bedroom homes. “So that is where we would like to target any additional monies that we get.” 

There are also many people stuck in emergency accommodation for more than four years, said Right to Change Councillor Pat Dunne. 

Back in business, then?

At the meeting, Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, said he would urge caution around saying that the tenant-in-situ scheme was back in place. 

“We have to be realistic,”  he said. “We don’t have any funding yet, we don’t know how it will be allocated, we just need to be careful of giving people false hope as well.”

Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney asked council officials multiple times what councillors should tell constituents with notices to quit their rental properties.

The answer: It depends. 

The tenant-in-situ scheme will not operate the way it did in the past, said council managers. 

The council will buy some homes for people at risk of homelessness but in a much more targeted way than the past, said Hayes, the DRHE director. 

Tenants will need to show that they are trying to secure another rented home, she said, and the council will explore all other options for rehousing them.

“There is a limited budget so how we use it will be very specific, and our engagement will be around exploring all other options before we do a tenant in situ,” said Hayes.  

Council staff will assess each applicant on a case-by-case basis and issue a recommendation, says Hayes. “The recommendation will be more limited than it was in the past because of the budget.”

The council may prioritise people who it cannot easily accommodate in homeless services, or those who it would struggle to move on out of homelessness, she said. 

For example, if the rented house has been adapted for the tenant’s disability, she would recommend the council purchase it so the person can stay in it, she said. 

“That is something that we can’t easily replicate either in homeless services or afterwards,” said Hayes.

Stopping and starting

When the government lifted the ban on no-fault evictions in April 2023, it pointed to the tenant-in-situ scheme as a means to hold back a spike in homelessness.

Councils could buy homes from landlords looking to sell, if the sitting tenants were on rent subsidy schemes such as the Housing Assistance Payment and Rental Accommodation Scheme.

“The Government will continue to support opportunities for the acquisition of properties to prevent homelessness and will take further targeted measures to increase acquisitions of properties where a landlord is selling the property,” said the then Minister for Housing Fianna Fáil TD Darragh O’Brien, in the Dáil in March 2023.

The Department of Housing set targets and promised additional staff, said O’Brien.

At that time too, the department launched a new scheme to buy homes for private-rental tenants who didn’t quite qualify for social housing, but faced eviction. The Housing Agency administered the scheme, called cost-rental tenant in situ.

By a few months in, though, the department had already changed the rules to tighten the tenant-in-situ scheme, shows a Focus Ireland briefing.

Approved housing bodies had shifted resources to take part in the scheme – bidding for single properties, and apartment blocks, it says. But the department suddenly changed the rules so that they couldn’t, it says.

The briefing noted several issues with the scheme’s operation at that stage. The biggest reason for deals not going ahead was those funding changes, and the second biggest was safety or legal concerns, it said.

For its part, in April 2023, Dublin City Council relaxed its rules for buying up second-hand homes for social tenants, aiming to purchase 25o homes with tenants in them that year.

In 2024, the council bought 261 homes with tenants, showed a presentation to the housing committee on Monday. 

But by March 2025, the Department of Housing had switched from pushing the tenant-in-situ scheme to containing it. 

This scheme was aimed only at those households that were at serious risk of homelessness, wrote David Dalton, a principal officer in the Department of Housing.

“The local authority must certify that the acquisition is only undertaken as a last resort in order to prevent homelessness,” he said. 

“In respect of acquisitions it is necessary to avoid undue impact on the private housing market, including avoiding competition in second hand acquisitions with first time buyers or with other private individuals/families,” he wrote.

At the council meeting, senior executive officer Ruth Dowling said that Dublin City Council had been constrained this year by its maximum budget of €95 million for all second-hand homes. 

With that pot, the council had to pay for homes it had already agreed to purchase in 2024 and, by March, it had struck deals for others too – and the €95 million was already accounted for, she said. 

The council stopped offering to buy any more homes at that point, she says.