There were times when “Louise” would go for a walk, to try to escape the four walls of the small B&B room she was living in, and would struggle to find the will to live. “There were times when I thought, ‘I actually don’t want to be here any more,’” she says. “It was very depressing.”
Louise, who is in her 50s, is a survivor of domestic abuse who fled what she describes as a “terrifying” relationship with her former partner of 20 years in early 2024. She is one of an unknown number of domestic abuse victims who become homeless in Ireland every year as a direct result of their efforts to escape abuse.
Frontline domestic abuse services and officials within the Department of Housing believe the number of women and children made homeless because of domestic violence is either being understated or not counted in official figures at all. And there are further concerns that domestic abuse victims living in social housing may be even more vulnerable to homelessness because of the confusing way that local authorities can treat survivors who have nowhere to go.
In Louise’s case, she had been a social housing tenant of Tipperary County Council for 14 years when she fled her former relationship. She and her former partner had been living in a social house together for six years, when Louise eventually decided in February 2024 that “it had gotten to a point where I couldn’t stay there”. “I was terrified of her, like I was so terrified I was blocking my bedroom door,” she says.
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Louise immediately discovered that no domestic abuse refuges anywhere in her own county had room for her. She was initially sent to a refuge in Limerick, before being transferred to another in Kilkenny. She stayed there for three months – the maximum time allowed in that refuge. When she left, she had nowhere else to go. That is how she ended up living in a small B&B room in Co Tipperary, which was being contracted as emergency accommodation. “I’d never been homeless in my life, but they don’t make it easy,” she says.
Louise tried to apply for social housing on her own. According to both Louise and her solicitor, she was told by Tipperary County Council that if she surrendered her old social housing tenancy, the local authority would consider her application. But once Louise did, she was then told that she would be excluded from social housing for a year as a penalty for “voluntarily” surrendering her tenancy.
To Louise, it did not feel voluntary at all. She thought about how her abuser was still in their old home, while she was the one facing homelessness. “I do get angry about that. I get angry about the whole situation.”
With the assistance of Mercy Law Resource Centre, which offers free legal aid to people affected by homelessness and social housing law, Louise was granted leave to take a judicial review against Tipperary County Council in November 2024. Kate Heffernan, Louise’s solicitor, says the council confirmed that it had applied its social housing policy to other domestic abuse victims in the same way that it had treated Louise.
A spokeswoman for the council says “a judicial review was sought and initiated” in Louise’s case, “but when details around the case were discussed between both parties’ legal representatives, the request for a judicial review was subsequently withdrawn”. The council settled, and early last year the council finally offered Louise social housing on her own.
Louise thinks about the other women and children that she saw in the refuges, who might be going through the same experience as her. “I don’t have children, but there were women with children there as well. That’s not fair on children. It’s not fair on the women either, and it wasn’t fair on me. But, you know, it needs to change,” she says.
“And I’ve often sat there and thought, the people with the power to change this, what if it was one of their children? Because we’re all a child of someone.”
Mercy Law says it has seen cases from all over the country where local authorities impose penalties on domestic abuse victims who are described as having “voluntarily” surrendered a social housing tenancy – when in reality, they had fled abuse. The violence experienced in some cases was so extreme that women had been held at knifepoint, or needed a garda escort to a refuge for their own protection.
Depending on the local authority, the penalty for “voluntarily” giving up a social house can vary from a wait of 12 months to three years before being allowed to access social housing again. With a dearth of private rental accommodation available across the country, and properties that fall within the scope of the Housing Assistance Payment being even rarer, there is concern that this policy could either push domestic abuse victims into homelessness or force them to return to the social house they shared with their abuser. Frontline domestic violence services have consistently warned that the most dangerous time for a victim can be when he/she attempts to leave or end the abusive relationship.
Erika Hayes, another solicitor at Mercy Law, believes there should be a “blanket ban” on any sort of consequence being imposed on a domestic abuse victim who leaves a social housing tenancy that she cannot safely stay in.
According to an analysis by Mercy Law, domestic abuse featured in the cases of 16 out of 37 families that it supported over the course of the last year or so. “It really is very prolific in our work,” Heffernan says.
Domestic violence is now thought to be one of the most understated causes of homelessness in Ireland. Most frontline domestic violence services believe the true number of women and children who become homeless every year in order to flee abusers is not reflected in official figures.
Official statistics do not count women and children living in refuges, including those living there long term, in homelessness figures.
It is understood that within the Department of Housing, there is a view that “relationship breakdown” – consistently one of the main reasons people present as homeless – may be referring to cases of domestic violence.
In other cases seen by Mercy Law, women living in a social home that is under attack from a violent former partner have been told by a local authority that they are technically “housed” and therefore cannot access emergency accommodation. Local authorities do not have a clear legal mechanism for permanently removing a perpetrator of domestic abuse from a joint social housing tenancy. Some victims have to rely on an abuser agreeing to surrender their tenancy.
Local authorities do have strong powers to remove a household from a social housing tenancy if and when there are cases of “antisocial” behaviour. But this policy treats the household as one unit, so both tenants could lose the property. The policy also only recognises antisocial behaviour as that resulting in harm to those outside the property. So, while a tenancy can be terminated if someone is violent towards any neighbour or council staff, there is no policy to cancel their tenancy if they are violent towards their own partner.
Women who are forced to leave social housing tenancies against their will, while the perpetrator of abuse remains in the family home, have to navigate not just the shock of finding themselves homeless but also the pressure and strain caused by being moved away from their community, their place of work or their child’s school.
I’ve had to threaten litigation just to get somebody in, to not sleep in their car that night with their child
— Erika Hayes, solicitor at Mercy Law
In other cases, the abuse women suffer is so life-threatening that they may have no choice but to leave their local area entirely. Those abuse survivors also face barriers in trying to access social housing through a new local authority.
Under its most recent housing plan, the first to single out domestic violence as a cause of homelessness in a meaningful way, the Government committed to creating a policy that would allow domestic abuse victims to transfer time spent on one social housing waiting list to another local authority. Minister for Housing James Browne has said it would be brought forward to early this year. Frontline domestic violence services are keen to see how this will work in practice.
Despite the Department of Housing promising as far back as 2023 to publish guidance for local authorities on how to treat homeless domestic abuse victims, there is still no sign of it. Organisations like Safe Ireland, the umbrella group for domestic abuse services, have been consistently asking the department when the new advice will be published. The department said in a statement that it is “finalising this review and proposed recommendations arising from the review”.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some local authorities and domestic abuse refuges may not be aware of the most recent guidelines, which were published in 2017. Under that guidance, a survivor who cannot return to her home should be considered homeless and provided with short-term emergency housing “on a humanitarian basis” – without a local authority having to assess the victim’s eligibility for social housing support or include them on the authority’s waiting list for housing supports. But in practice, this does not always happen.
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Mercy Law could cite three cases where women were refused homelessness supports by local authorities; two cases involved women with children. Solicitor Hayes says local authorities have had to be threatened with legal action in cases where they mistakenly believed it is not their responsibility to offer emergency accommodation to domestic violence victims.
“I’ve had to threaten litigation just to get somebody in, to not sleep in their car that night with their child. Because of misunderstandings of entitlement,” Hayes says.
Domestic abuse refuges are now reporting cases of women and children who seek to stay in their emergency accommodation for longer periods of time, because they have nowhere else to move on to.
One example from Meath shows how the housing crisis affects domestic abuse victims. Figures provided by Meath Women’s Refuge and Support Services, which provides support and accommodation for women and children living with abuse in the home, show that at least 19 women in the county ended up homeless after they fled domestic violence in 2024. Those 19 women – who went from the refuge into homeless accommodation – represent almost a third of domestic abuse victims who left the refuge that year.
Due to what the refuge describes as a “a dearth of private or social accommodation”, only five of the 61 women who left the service in 2024 moved on to local authority housing, while just two women were able to find private rental accommodation. Another seven returned to their homes “without support”.
The centre says that while a threat of homelessness might be one reason why a woman would go back to her home, there are a “myriad” other reasons.
Domestic abuse victims living in private homes are also at risk of becoming homeless. Though these survivors may appear to be in a more stable economic position, because they rent or own their own home, many could be suffering from sustained, coercive financial abuse.
The constitutional property rights of abusers can also make it legally difficult for a survivor to remain in her home with her children, while her attacker is removed on a permanent basis. Former minister for justice Helen McEntee and current Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan have both said they want to shift towards policies which would allow authorities to remove a perpetrator from a family home, and allow a survivor and their children to remain.
But the Department of Justice is understood to have received legal advice warning that this may affect an abuser’s constitutional rights to their own property.
Sarah Hamill, an assistant professor in law at Trinity College, points out that the Constitution says private property rights should be exercised in line with the principles of social justice, and that a person’s property rights may be limited in favour of the common good.
Hamill says a number of property law scholars in Ireland would argue that the Government has “more room to be a bit more progressive on property rights”. She questions whether the “fear” of the Government losing a legal challenge could be limiting its ability to offer greater protection to victims who wish to stay in their own homes. “There’s just a fear of being on the losing side of an argument here,” she says.
Back in Tipperary, Louise remains in the social house that she had to fight for, but her new home is far away from her own community and she feels isolated. Water drips from the ceiling, and she has pictures on her phone of the wet bedsheets below the leak. She dreads having to call the council about it.
Louise is hoping for a transfer, but understands that other homeless people will have to take priority ahead of her.
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I wasn’t really happy, because it’s not really a victory. There was part of me that was happy, because hopefully it will help other people,” Louise says.
“It’s the isolation, the depression. It’s not a happy ending.”
