Haunted Homes: Renters' Fear, Landlord Control, and the Colonial Legacy in Ireland

Introduction

“I am anxious because I do not own the place I live in.” — Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking.

Ireland’s housing crisis is not new. While the current emergency has been exacerbated by austerity, deregulation, and market-driven housing policy (Hearne, 2020), the power imbalance between renters and landlords has historical antecedents in Ireland’s colonial subjugation under British rule. This article examines how the fear and precarity experienced by Irish renters today echo colonial systems of land control, class hierarchy, and psychological disempowerment, arguing for a decolonial rethinking of housing and belonging.

The Land as Loss: Colonial Dispossession and the Irish Psyche

Ireland’s colonial history is marked by forced evictions, land theft, and the transformation of communal landholding into private ownership under English rule (Kinealy, 1994). The Penal Laws, Cromwellian plantations, and the Great Famine entrenched a system in which Irish Catholics became tenants in their own land, often to absentee British landlords (Lloyd, 2008). The trauma of eviction, hunger, and homelessness became collective memory, passed down through generations.

This severing of communities from landownership engendered deep psychological harm—what Fanon (1963) called “the colonial wound”—a rupture between people and place that persists in modern Ireland. The contemporary rental crisis revives these historical traumas, where Irish renters are again made strangers in their own homes.

Neoliberal Continuities: From Colonisers to Corporate Landlords

Ireland's postcolonial state has, paradoxically, adopted economic models that reproduce colonial logics. The shift from social housing to private rentals, especially after the 2008 financial crash, has emboldened landlordism and reduced housing to a commodity (Byrne, 2020). International vulture funds, enabled by government policies, now own significant shares of Irish rental housing (Hearne, 2017), echoing the old absentee landlord dynamic.

This structural violence manifests in everyday fear. Renters face arbitrary evictions, lack of long-term tenancy rights, and rising unaffordability, with little legal recourse (Threshold, 2023). Landlords can often dictate not just rents but emotional conditions—silencing complaints, inspecting properties without notice, or threatening eviction. As O’Callaghan et al. (2019) argue, this produces “housing precarity as a form of slow violence,” eroding wellbeing and autonomy.

Psychological Impact: Fear, Powerlessness, and Internalised Coloniality

From a psychotherapeutic standpoint, the fear experienced by renters today often mirrors the disempowerment and helplessness inflicted by colonial rule. This dynamic can be understood as a form of internalised unworthiness—a legacy of being historically dispossessed and treated as second-class citizens in one’s own country. The landlord figure in this context may unconsciously evoke the colonial authority figure: powerful, untouchable, and capable of destroying one's sense of safety at any moment.

Such dynamics are especially acute for marginalised communities—migrants, Travellers, lone parents—who face intersectional layers of housing discrimination (Haynes & Power, 2021). These communities, already facing racialised or class-based stigmas, are often forced into substandard housing with little protection, thus replicating colonial power asymmetries within a supposedly egalitarian republic.

Resisting the Colonial Logic: Towards Housing Justice

A decolonial approach to housing justice in Ireland would involve recognising housing not as a market good but a human right and site of belonging. Drawing from Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientisation, renters’ resistance must begin with naming their condition—not as personal failure or market inevitability, but as structural injustice rooted in colonial patterns.

Movements like CATU (Community Action Tenants Union) and Raise the Roof exemplify this resistance, mobilising renters to assert their rights and reclaim collective power. Similarly, therapeutic spaces must engage with housing insecurity not only as background context but as central to clients’ distress and identity formation (Watts, 2018).

Conclusion

The crisis of housing in Ireland cannot be disentangled from its colonial past. The trauma of land dispossession lives on in renters’ fears and landlords’ unchecked authority. To challenge these dynamics, both policymakers and psychotherapists must adopt a decolonial lens—acknowledging the psychosocial legacies of colonisation and resisting the neoliberal reproduction of landlordism. Healing, in this context, requires more than personal resilience; it requires structural transformation and the reclamation of housing as a site of dignity and belonging.

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