On Saturday, March 29th, the CATU Eviction Nation report was launched at Connolly Books.

Evictions are one of the most harmful features of the current housing crisis in Ireland, causing a
vast amount of hardship and disruption amongst tenants and working class communities. But in
order to resist evictions we first need to know who is responsible and how they operate.

Eviction Nation provides a detailed investigation of evictions in Ireland over the past decade, including
who is responsible and how they get away with it. It provides resources which can be used to
resist evictions and exposes the landlords, investors and speculators responsible for the
eviction crisis.

The report is available for purchase at Connolly Books and Little Deer Comics in
Dublin, or read it online at https://topevictors.ie/Eviction%20Nation.pdf.

CATU members have been working on the project for over a year and a half as part of the eviction database group. The project has grown out of a much longer history, built on years of landlord research conducted by members to defend against eviction.

Drawing on records of disputes dealt with by the Residential Tenancies Board, the report provides new insights regarding both legal and illegal evictions and the failures of regulation and enforcement that allow them to take place on such a widespread scale. It also includes detailed, illustrated profiles of ten of the country’s most prolific evictors, describing who they are and how they operate.

The report is the second output the eviction database group has developed, alongside the topevictors.ie website which launched in February. The website and report reveal 353 officially recorded illegal evictions between 2015 and 2024, as well as 4,524 eviction orders issued by the RTB – these are ‘legal’ evictions which have come through the RTB disputes process.

A key finding of the research was that both small landlords, who may only own a few properties, and large landlords including corporate real estate investors and Approved Housing Bodies, often evict tenants in pursuit of profit. Small landlords are disproportionately responsible for the violent, sensational types of illegal eviction that occasionally catch media attention, and can give rise to the narrative that it is only ‘a few bad apples’ that mistreat their tenants.

However, large landlords are responsible for a growing proportion of total evictions, reflecting the growing consolidation of the rental market in Ireland and the fact that these actors have the knowledge and resources to follow the relatively simple process to evict their tenants legally. While small and large landlords have different ways of dealing with tenants, in both cases their business models can involve eviction.

The less dramatic, and entirely legal evictions are often just as devastating for those forced out of their homes. Ultimately, the strategies of both small and large landlords are motivated by private profit and both are deeply harmful to tenants. Work such as the Eviction Nation report and the landlord database website, collectively undertaken in order to assist tenants to organise
and defend against eviction, are essential in challenging the injustice of widespread evictions.

At the launch, data visualisation expert Rudi O’Malley presented work he has created with the data gathered by the CATU eviction database team. The visualisation, named Snakes and Landlords, presents some aspects of the research in a digestible, interactive format, highlighting some of the key findings of the research. Check out Rudi’s work here
https://snakesandlandlords.topevictors.ie.

Enormous thanks to everyone who contributed to the project, and to those who came on the night and engaged with great discussion, questions and ideas for next steps for the project. If you’re interested in being a part of future iterations of this work join CATU and reach out to admin@catuireland.org