Tenant in-situ scheme reopens in south Dublin after council secures additional €7.5m
Applications for the tenant-in-situ scheme will be reopened by South Dublin County Council (SDCC) after it secured extra funding.
The scheme, which allows the council to buy property from landlords when a tenant is at risk of homelessness, was paused earlier this year because the budget had been “exhausted”.
Presenting a Housing Allocations Report at area committee meetings for Tallaght and Lucan, council management said an additional €7.5m will be borrowed from its budget for 2026.
“We’ve been advised to work with this figure to restart the programme for units that were closed in 2025,” SDCC management said.
“We haven’t been given our allocation for next year as of yet, but we have been told that between now and the end of the year, we can commit an extra €7.5m to be drawn down from 2026.
“We can start accepting expressions of interest again up to the first quarter of next year. So we can look at about 30pc of our allocation now.”
The council was originally allocated a budget of €25m this year. In August, SDCC became the third council in Dublin to pause the scheme.
The council will now engage with people on the in-situ list who were refused due to a lack of funding earlier this year.
People Before Profit councillor for Tallaght, Kay Keane, enquired about the next steps that tenants and landlords in the county would need to take.
“If a house had progressed to the legal stage and for whatever reason funding wasn’t there this year – would the landlord have to go through the whole process again?” she asked.
“Or will the council contact people who were very close to securing a home?”
Independent councillor Madeleine Johansson, who represents Palmerstown–Fonthill, added: “If people are still interested in selling to the council, will we go back to those who were told the scheme wasn’t available?”
Tallaght-Central councillor Niamh Whelan asked whether or not “those who were refused will be able to get priority?”.
SDCC said its allocations team was working to prioritise applications paused due to the lack of funding.
“We will go back and look at what we had on file at the time – it would be a case of contacting landlords and the tenants they were looking to sell to,” said the manager.
“Some of those tenants might have moved, they might have found new tenancies, but we will look back.
“Our first port of call will be to review those applications – we’ve already engaged with the allocation team to engage with people who were already looking to move into a new home and it was stalled.
“The funding was fully allocated for 2025, we worked very closely with our team to put in interventions for applicants who were at the top of the list to see where we could facilitate solutions for them.”
The council also said it would prioritise people will disabilities, people over 55, and those at risk of homelessness when they go forward with the scheme.