Rootlessness: How the Irish private rental sector prevents tenants feeling secure in their homes and tenant’s resistance against this

Abstract

Ireland’s housing situation in the 2020s is similar to many other Anglophone countries, including Australia and the UK: A deepening housing crisis, an increased reliance on the private rental sector, and a residual ideological preference for homeownership, despite this increasingly being a less viable option for ‘Generation Rent’. Using Fullilove’s concept of rootshock, we argue that tenant perceptions of landlords’ actions and beliefs can contribute to a sense of rootlessness: no or few ties to the spatial setting of the dwelling. Using work done by resistance scholars, we also demonstrate that the inability to feel fully ontologically secure in one’s residence often leads to attempts by the tenant to make roots in their dwellings or resist rootlessness to create the sense of being at home. Based on qualitative research undertaken in 2019 with renters in three Irish cities, Dublin, Cork and Galway, we examine everyday forms of resistance, to explore the possibilities tenants carve out for themselves in order to survive and exist in the private rental sector and conclude by asking how we can learn from these practices to think about how to improve living standards for tenants.