housing in Ireland

["John O'Neill" <johnfergaloneill@xxxxxxxxxx>]

JUNE EDWARDS

The Sunday Tribune 16.06.02

Calls for right to housing renewed at conference



The assertion, whether true or not, that 'everyone has a right to a home',
was the topic of much debate at the recent one-day  conference 'Housing
Rights  - A New Agenda?', hosted by Threshold and the Centre for Urban and
Regional Studies.

Rather than simply addressing numbered, shortages and allocations of
housing, the conference took an interesting approach to the whole question
of Social Housing, by exploring it as a right rather than a privilege.
Security of tenure was also on the agenda, as indeed it was also on the
agenda for the Irish tenant farmers of the 19th century.

Calls for the right to housing to be included in the constitution have
surfaced recently from various sectors of the community.  The need for a
'rights-based approach' to housing has come in the wake of Ireland's recent
rapid economic growth, which has seen house prices increase dramatically,
benefiting investors  but pushing many more further out to the margins.

Taking a slightly academic approach, key speakers which included Prof PJ
Drudy of Trinity College Dublin, Simon Brooke and  Jerome Connolly, explored
the term 'rights-based approach', which is one of the current buzzwords
within the voluntary sector.

Looking at how international law deals with the question of housing rights,
some speakers cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drawn up in
1948, in which civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights appear
on the same list.

However, according to Jerome Connolly, former executive director of the
Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, the divide between civil and
political, and social and economic rights is a historic one which even
precludes the rise of Marxism if the 19th century, and economic and social
liberties have never quite received the same legislative commitment that
civil and political rights have.  Housing rights generally refer to the
right to shelter an opposed to the right to a home.

However, earlier this year the UN Committee in Geneva strongly recommended
that Ireland incorporate social, economic and cultural rights into its
constitution as well as on other domestic legislation. Such inclusion would
lead to a more rights-based approach to social housing.

Some of the concerns of those who are apposed to a rights-based to housing
being included in the European Social Charter include fears over the
open-ended resources necessary, along with the fact that the task of levying
those resources, rationing them and allocating them would be left to the
court.

However, Brooke said that fears of opening the door to unlimited and
impracticable resource adjudications can be met by the insertion of
qualifying language, such as is already to be found in the rights language
of the Irish constitution.

Simon Brooke, who has worked in the area of homelessness and community
development in both the UK and Ireland, suggested that the balance of rights
currently lies firmly with owner-occupiers, while social housing tenants
have far less security of tenure.

"Rights mean little if they are not enforceable," said Brooke, while
presenting a tenants charter that would incorporate a package of rights, to
include security of tenure, the rights to pass on tenancy to children, the
right to take in lodgers and the right to make improvements.

Arguing that renting, whether social or private, is still treated as a
second-best option on Ireland, Brooke suggested that unequal rights between
owning and renting added to the notion that owner-occupation was the natural
form of housing tenure.  Therefore the increased rights of tenure of social
housing tenants would help to reduce the unpopularity of long-term renting.

And while the social housing system works well to a certain degree, more
defined legal rights would appear to make good sense.  Historically and
socially there is a tendency to treat social housing tenants in a
patriarchal manner, by not empowering residents to make decisions over
repairs and improvements, even refusing them the authority to paint their
front door a different colour.

While the focus of the conference was on the rights of social housing
tenants, and offered some very interesting new approaches to the issue here
was little discussion about the vast numbers of people who fall between
social and private housing, for whom there seems to be no provisions made.
Many people earn too little to either rent or purchase a decent home, and if
they are employed and have no dependents, they are often not eligible for
local authority housing.




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