The Supreme Court has ruled in Donegan v DCC & Gallagher v DCC that Irish social housing law is incompatible with Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights as it fails to provide procedural protections to housing authority tenants against eviction. The provision in question, Section 62 of the Housing Act 1966, allows a local authority to secure a court order for possession of a council house without an independent inquiry.
Justice McKechnie held that under the relevant legislation, “an occupier has no right or entitlement to raise any defence to ... an application [for possession], other than by way of challenging the housing authority on ...[certain] formal proofs. In addition, the absence of judicial discretion means that the personal circumstances of such occupier must be disregarded as being irrelevant; equally so with questions regarding the reasonableness or fairness of making the Order: these simply have no part in this statutory procedure”.
The suggested procedural safeguard of judicial review was then held to be unsatisfactory in such instances. The court further rejected the ‘floodgates’ argument submitted by the Council, holding that violations could not be allowed to remain without a remedy merely to avoid administrative burdens on the council.
The Oireachtas must now address this issue by bringing Irish law in line with the ECHR. This is an extremely important development for Irish law, as it is only the second declaration of incompatibility with the European Convention to be finalised in Ireland since the 2003 Act. The only other finding of incompatibility with the ECHR was issued in the Lydia Foy case.