Landlords will be able to apply for the tenant-in-situ scheme again
Extra €7.5 million committed to council for tenant-in-situ scheme
Renters in south Dublin looking to buy their homes from their landlords will be able to apply for the Tenant-in-Situ scheme again.
The Department of Housing has allowed a number of councils, including South Dublin County Council, to access funding from next year’s budget to allow them to progress with acquisitions under the scheme again.
SDCC was one of a number of councils forced to suspend their tenant-in-situ schemes earlier this year
The scheme allows for tenants to stay in their homes if their landlord decides to sell, by having the local council or Housing Agency buy it from them.
Introduced in April 2023, it has stalled since the end of 2024, when the previous government could not agree on funding targets on time.
SDCC had been allocated a budget of €25million for 2025 for the scheme, announced in August that they were no longer accepting new applications as the budget had been fully used up.
“We undertook a review to determine our acquisitions programme for this year in line with DHLGH criteria, funding, and guidance,” the council said in a statement to The Echo.
A senior council official told the Tallaght Area committee meeting on Monday, September 22, that they had been advised by the government to “work with a figure and restart the tenant-in-situ programme for units that will close in 2026”.
“We haven’t been given our allocation yet for 2026, but they have said between now and the end of the year we can commit an extra €7.5 million to be drawn down,” Vivienne Hartnett, senior executive officer for Housing Provision and Financial Management told councillors.
Cllrs Niamh Whelan (SF) and Kay Keane (PBP-S) questioned what this meant for those who may have missed out on the scheme in 2025 due to funding drying up, and whether those who had begun the process only to be refused would be prioritised in the allocation of this new funding.
Ms Hartnett said her department would go back and look at “what we had the on file at the time”.
“We will be looking back across the expressions of interest that we had in place at the time, and for those that we had to refuse on the basis of no funding.
“I will say that when the funding was fully allocated for 2025, we did work closely with our allocations team to put in interventions for applicants who were quite close to the top of the Tenant-in-Situ to facilitate different solutions for those tenants,” she added.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
