Professor Colm O'Cinneide:

I thank the Senator for her excellent questions. In respect of her first question, she is right that in its 2019 conclusions, the European committee noted that Housing for All had been introduced and was being implemented. The committee effectively reserved its decision in respect of that and asked the Irish State to keep it updated about progress. It did not make any findings about the wider housing situation in Ireland pending information on how Housing for All has been rolled out. The 2019 conclusions, effectively, suspend any opinion on the implementation of Housing for All and note that the strategy was introduced to engage with the housing problems in Ireland. The committee's conclusions noted that inadequate housing for vulnerable groups and inadequate protection for Traveller families, in particular, are a long-standing problem. The 2019 conclusions relate to earlier conclusions that had run through for most of the 2010s.

The Senator asked the key question of how would a right to housing, if included in the Constitution, act as a catalyst for change. The last thing that anyone wants is to have a constitutional dead letter, to have something nice inserted in the Constitution that just sits there but does not do much good. My own view, which is based on research into comparative developments in this area in Europe and the wider world, is that there are two general ways in which a right to housing can act as a catalyst.

I will use the simple categories of "political" and "legal" to illustrate the two ways. Politically, a right to housing can act as a focus for political change. The symbolic statement that this right is important, that it is a constitutional priority, means that it can be invoked by political parties, NGO groups, trade unions and others to push for change, and it also acts as a focus within the legislative branches of parliament. It is quite striking to me, for example, in studying how equivalent institutions to these work across continental Europe, that there is often a strong focus on what are known as the social-state provisions of continental European constitutions. I refer to the provisions of the Italian state constitution or the social-state provisions of the German constitution that commit the state to advancing social progress. Having constitutional provisions there in relation to something like the right to housing can act as the focus for legislative review and scrutiny, which then in turn can feed down through the state processes in general.

The second aspect is legal. Having a right to housing means that the courts can take it into account when, for example, interpreting property rights. It can help to rebalance or compensate for any excessive focus on private property rights that might hamper a more reasonable statewide housing strategy. It can also empower the courts to deal with manifest failures by the state of blatantly inadequate housing such as clear manifest failure by local authorities to do the job they should be doing in respect of housing or clear failure by Departments to take the action they should be taking. In other words, a right to housing can have catalytic effects in both the political and legal spheres. It is not just a matter of law and lawyers. In fact, in many ways, if it all works according to plan, its primary effect may actually be in the sphere of politics, administration and policy. That would be a good thing.