The High Court has refused a mother and her five children an order quashing Galway County Council decisions to end their emergency accommodation and defer their housing application for one year.
In a judgment delivered on 21 December 2017, Ms Justice O’Regan found that the applicants had not established a right to quash the council’s appeal decision of 28 June 2017 or the decision, if any, to end emergency accommodation on 3 July 2017. The court refused the relief sought.
The family, members of the travelling community, had been living in private rented accommodation until a notice of termination led the mother to seek emergency accommodation in February 2017. The council offered a four-bedroom dwelling in T, County Galway, on 1 June 2017. The mother refused it after making inquiries, citing the lack of a comparable five-day specialised placement there for her youngest child, who has autism and other medical and intellectual needs. The family had been living at an undisclosed location since 3 July.
The applicants argued that the offer was unreasonable and that ending emergency accommodation failed to account for their housing needs, the children’s education and the family’s vulnerability. Reports submitted on their behalf raised concerns about moving schools and the effect on the youngest child’s placement. The council said the dwelling was its only available four-bedroom property, that the family had been prioritised, and that supports would be arranged in T as far as possible.
The judge said the council had to have regard to the applicants’ constitutional and European Convention rights. She found that its 28 June letter showed it had considered the family’s correspondence, housing urgency and vulnerability, and had weighed their needs against available resources. The applicants had not established that ending emergency accommodation was irrational or unlawful, or that it breached their rights. The court also noted that they had not tendered evidence of unsuitable education in T beyond the reports described in the judgment.
The court separately upheld the challenge to the housing-list deferral. The judge found that the council had statutory authority to defer an application and had not fettered its discretion through its scoring matrix. The first applicant had answered in 2010 and 2011 that she had no conviction for disorderly conduct in a public place in the preceding five years, although she had such a conviction in 2009. The judgment records that she had 89 convictions, described in the proceedings as minor offences. The judge concluded that the matrix allowed individual consideration and that the council’s scoring was within its jurisdiction.