Kate Heffernan

The woman, who can not be named due to court-ordered reporting restrictions, is a client of Mercy Law Resource Centre and is being represented in the High Court action by the law centre’s solicitor Kate Heffernan.

According to the law centre, the woman fled her former local authority home due to domestic violence and entered a domestic violence refuge. She is now homeless, living in emergency B&B accommodation.

She sought social housing in her own name, explaining it was unsafe to return to her previous residence. The council required her to surrender her joint tenancy before it would consider her application for new housing supports.

The applicant complied with the instruction to surrender her tenancy — but was then excluded from consideration for social housing for a year on the grounds that she had “voluntarily” surrendered her tenancy.

This decision was upheld on internal review by the council.

The woman’s lawyers argue that the surrender in this case was not “voluntary” and that the council’s decision breaches administrative and human rights law, misapplies its own allocation scheme, and amounts to an unlawful fettering of its discretion through the application of an inflexible policy to victims of domestic violence.

Céile Varley BL represented the woman in the High Court this morning, where Mr Justice Garrett Simons granted leave for a judicial review, saying the woman appeared to be put in “a Catch-22 situation”.

Ms Heffernan said: “The council stated that it has treated the applicant in line with how it has treated other victims of domestic violence in similar cases.

“The case brings a focus to this approach of the council in respect of excluding a victim of domestic abuse from social housing allocations for a period, where the victim surrenders an interest in a property they fled, and that surrender is required in order for the victim to access supports in their own name.”