Sir - As with house-prices, rents in the private rented sector have been spiralling out of control in the last few years, with many tenants facing exorbitant rent increases. But calls for rent control are regularly brushed aside by the claim (most recently repeated at the Young Fine Gael conference) that rent control is unconstitutional.
In fact, the claim is ill-founded. It is based on a garbled account of what the Supreme Court decided in the case of Blake v the Attorney-General (1981). That decision struck down the Rents Restrictions Acts (1946-1967) which had provided some tenants with a combination of indefinite security of tenure and rents frozen at 1950s levels.
The Court stated that the form of rent control provided by those Acts, when taken together with indefinite security of tenure, was unconstitutional. Likewise, the Acts' provision of indefinite security of tenure, when combined with such rent control, was deemed unconstitutional.
In other words, the judgment left open the possibility that either a rent freeze on its own, or indefinite security of tenure on its own, might not be unconstitutional.
There are other forms of rent control, e.g. annual rent increases limited to the rate of inflation, as found in many EU states and US cities. Since the Supreme Court did not deem rent freeze as such to be unconstitutional, it is less likely that a flexible, inflation-sensitive form of rent control, coupled with limited security of tenure, would be deemed unconstitutional.
Good judgments are marked by their inherent reasonableness. Rents frozen at 1950s levels for tenants with indefinite security of tenure were clearly unreasonable by the 1970s, as even tenants acknowledged. Today, it is the absence of any security of tenure for tenants (apart from the minority with leases at the upper end of the market) along with the lack of rent control which is unreasonable. Such tenants are in no position to bargain over rent increases, since without security they can be evicted even for asserting those few rights (e.g. in the area of accommodation standards) which they have at present. People with no residential security from one week to the next, and who can be thrown out at the landlord's whim, cannot really be said to have a "home".
Far from wanting to strip tenants of all protection, the Supreme Court, in striking down the Rents Restrictions Acts, drew the government's attention to the need to protect affected tenants by providing a means for "determination of fair rents" and a "degree of security of tenure". No such things exist for most tenants in the private rented sector today. If the Court once held they should be provided for one group of tenants, it might yet decide that it is unconstitutional not to provide them for all tenants.
Last year, the Bacon report on housing raised the issue of landlord-tenant law, noting the need for an "appropriate balance in tenure rights", and recommended that the matter be referred to the Law Reform Commission. To date, there is no sign that the Government intends to do so. But it is high time that the legislative neglect of tenants' rights be ended. - Yours, etc.,
Seamus Murphy SJ, Lecturer in Philosophy, Milltown Institute, Dublin 6.