“I just cannot get over that they didn’t maintain the same level of funding at a minimum, because it’s a bloody great scheme,” says Fine Gael Councillor Tom O’Leary, of the homelessness-prevention scheme.
The Department of Housing has cut its annual funding to Fingal County Council for its tenant-in-situ scheme by roughly half.
The central government has granted €20 million to Fingal for all of its second-hand home acquisitions this year, which include the tenant-in-situ scheme, a council spokesperson said.
But that figure is much less than what was spent on the tenant-in-situ scheme alone last year.
Fingal spent €39.9 million buying up homes through the tenant-in-situ scheme in 2024, according to council figures given to Fine Gael Councillor Tom O’Leary and Sinn Féin Councillor Angela Donnelly.
Under the scheme, councils can buy private rentals and convert them to social homes, in cases where a landlord is looking to evict households and sell up, and the households would qualify for social housing.
Councils have been pushing back against limitations the department placed on the scheme in March, including a recommendation properties must be rented through a council-administered rent subsidy scheme for two years before they are bought.
“In my head, I just cannot get over that they didn’t maintain the same level of funding at a minimum, because it’s a bloody great scheme,” said O’Leary, the Fine Gael councillor, on Monday.
Since March 2023, Fingal has purchased 354 homes when a tenant was facing eviction because the landlord sought to sell up. It has hundreds of more applications that are due to be processed.
O’Leary says the scheme has been effective in preventing those renters from being made homeless, and far more money should be going into it.
“Why not keep the scheme going?” he says. “Why would you mess with a successful scheme that keeps people from being scattered into the wind?”
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said the scheme was brought in in March 2023, and has acted as a “short-term” measure to prevent homelessness after the eviction ban in place over the previous winter was lifted.
Yet, while the Department of Housing has presented it as a recent intervention for the short-term, it hasn’t been.
Tenant-in-situ schemes predate the lifting of the eviction ban. Dublin City Council first ran a pilot scheme in 2018 as an anti-homelessness measure, and kept it going due to demand.
The Department of Housing briefly shut down the scheme in 2022, citing concern about competition with private buyers – but then u-turned and brought it back.
Meanwhile, as the government cuts back the tenant-in-situ scheme, which is meant to prevent homelessness, the number of people in Ireland who are homeless keeps rising.
The number of people accessing emergency accommodation in Ireland increased by 11.2 percent to 15,418 over the past year, according to the Department of Housing’s latest quarterly report on homelessness.
Fingal bought 221 homes under the tenant-in-situ scheme in 2023, said Minister for Housing James Browne, a Fianna Fáil TD, during a Dáil debate on the rental sector on 20 March.
In 2024, that figure dropped to 121 homes, according to figures given by council officials to councillors O’Leary and Donnelly.
By March 2025, it had bought another 12 homes, council figures show, while 19 more were at the conveyance stage and 207 were at the application stage.
The 121 homes in 2024 cost €39.9 million, said Paul Carroll, Fingal’s interim director of housing to councillors Donnelly and O’Leary in an email on 17 April.
So, the concern is that the €20 million granted to Fingal County Council for the scheme – and to cover other acquisition schemes such as homes through the buy and renew thread – won’t stretch as far as needed in 2025.
Already, millions of that is spent, Carroll said.
At the end of 2024, Fingal had closed purchase on 25 properties, and gone sale-agreed on 34 – all of which have to be funded out of the 2025 allocation, he said. “To date in 2025 we have closed 24 of them, totalling €7.9m,” he said.
Some agreed sales may fall through during the conveyance process, Carroll said. “So it is not possible to say exactly how much of the allocation these current acquisitions will ultimately require.”
This year’s allocation may end up used to finalise purchases made last year, said Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor, on Monday. “There’s not going to be a whole lot left after they finish off with those properties.”
Her concern is one echoed by councillors in other local authority areas.
O’Leary, the Fine Gael councillor, says that if the scheme is going to continue to have any impact, way more money needs to be injected.
He suggests €50 million. “It’s taking into account inflation and all sorts of things. We need that at least,” he says. “This isn’t going to go away.”
It’s urgently needed, he says. “I’m not exaggerating. I’m starting to get regular emails from people looking for help.”
Even though France requires them, England builds them, and Wicklow County Council installed some years ago.
A spokesperson for the Dublin Region Homeless Executive said its priority was “to ensure there is an adequate provision of accommodation for people experiencing homelessness”.
The current skirmish is over a Manna base at Junction 6 in Blanchardstown.
There is debate over whether there is a shortage of residentially zoned land and what’s holding homes up.
