About
Starting in November 2023, members of the Community Action Tenants Union Ireland have been working together to build a database of evictions and those landlords responsible for carrying them out. The project is a response to the lack of publicly available information about evictions in Ireland.
Community Action Tenants Union – We only want the Earth
Evictions destroy lives and communities. By gathering information about them the project aims to help understand the scale of the problem, to force those in power to recognise its severity, to resist evictions more effectively and to hold landlords to account.
The overall idea of the database is that landlords should not be able to act with impunity when carrying out evictions, which result in hardship, trauma and homelessness, and to highlight the lack of state intervention to address the eviction crisis.
Methodology and data sources
The main source of data for the project has been records of disputes between landlords and tenants lodged with the Residential Tenancies Board between 2015-2014.
The RTB is the official government body responsible for regulating the private rental sector in the Republic of Ireland. This includes managing a dispute resolution service to which landlords and tenants can submit disputes or appeal decisions previously made.
The RTB makes information about disputes available to the public by publishing the outcomes of cases (in the form of ‘Determination Orders’ and, where applicable, Tribunal Reports) on their website through their disputes database. Records of all disputes between 2015 and 2024 are available online and these are the years for which data has been collected for this project.
RTB Dispute Resolution Database
The information on the RTB website is made available in individual scanned PDFs which are non-text-searchable. The overall quality of the interface for browsing and searching these documents is not user-friendly. The RTB also does not publish any information about case outcomes, for example through its Data Hub.
The work of the research team has involved finding ways to use this data to identify patterns and extract useful, actionable information.
In relation to illegal evictions, the research process involved manually searching for, downloading and reading each of 1387 cases under the category of ‘unlawful termination’ in order to record the decision made by the RTB (i.e. whether or not the eviction was determined to be illegal) and gather information about how the decision was made.
Further information about the landlords involved in legal and illegal eviction cases, including about their properties, business interests and involvement in other tenancy disputes was collected using the Irish Property Price Register, the Land Registry and company records.
Through this process the team has developed lists of some of Ireland’s worst landlords, in terms of both the number of evictions and the level of violence involved in carrying them out. You can find out more by checking out the worst evictor profiles.
Limits to the Methodology
RTB case files are a valuable source of information about evictions and those responsible, but they are not comprehensive and there are various problems and limits associated with using them.
In the case of legal evictions, RTB data shows that between January 2022 to July 2024, 27,856 eviction notices were filed with the RTB, while over the same period the RTB issued 1,369 eviction orders. This is obviously only a small proportion of the total, but these cases are the only ones for which information about the location of the property and identity of the landlord is publicly available.
In relation to illegal evictions, the project has found records of 376 illegal evictions between 2015-2024. You can check out the illegal evictions map to see details of each case.
This is a lot but is still mostly likely only a small proportion of the total number. This is because many tenants who are illegally evicted don’t take a case to the RTB due to a lack of knowledge of their rights and the difficulties and delays associated with the process.
Second, people who are judged to be ‘licencees’, usually people living with their landlord (or where the landlord claims that this is the case) aren’t protected by tenancy law and the RTB doesn’t have jurisdiction to investigate these cases.
Last, the RTB has an extremely restrictive and inconsistent definition of what qualifies as an illegal eviction and often doesn’t count instances where tenants are harassed or intimidated into leaving.
In one case (DR0220-60802/TR0920-004423) a landlord entered a tenant’s bedroom, took his phone, tried to force him out of the house and only left when the gardaí arrived. This - understandably - caused the tenant to move out as soon as he could because he felt unsafe, but the RTB found that this was not an illegal eviction because the tenant was not actually physically removed (and also decided that the tenant owed extra rent because he left without giving notice).
This shows the challenges for tenants to prove an illegal eviction has taken place and means that the number we have recorded is almost certainly much lower than the number of tenants being forced out of their homes.
While it is hoped that this project can be a powerful resource for asserting the rights of tenants in Ireland, it also shows how much information is unavailable and the extent to which evictions are hidden from view. There is much more work that must be done to reveal the true extent of this social emergency and to fight for housing justice.
Cases in the North
This project was originally intended to include the entire island of Ireland, however due to the lack of publicly available data in the North this was not achievable.
There is no equivalent body to the RTB in Northern Ireland where disputes are handled through mediation services or through the courts.
As members of an all Ireland union, it is disappointing that tenants in the North will not be able to protect themselves as easily from the worst landlords through the use of public databases like this.
However, we are interested in expanding the project to include other sources of data, such as crowdsourced information about evictions, that would cover the North. If you have ideas or are interested in getting involved please contact the email below.
admin@catuireland.org