Financially struggling 80-year-old didn't call tenant on the DAY her husband died. RTB says she owes him €19,522 for his bigger, pricier new home
TR0001469, Drury Hall, Dublin 2. Published 29 Sept.
What she did
In July 2024 she, the landlord, served an own-occupation notice: statutory declaration, 180 days, RTB copy on the day. The Tribunal never questioned that her intention was genuine — it accepted that her husband's death caused "a genuine change in her plans." He (the tenant) moved out in January 2025 and got his full €1,700 deposit back.
In May 2025 her husband died. Her son-in-law also died. Her representative told the Tribunal the family is "not in good financial circumstances." Rather than leave the flat empty, she let it on short weekly arrangements "for insurance, security and management reasons". She never offered it back to him. That's a breach of the offer-back rule, and her side accepted it: "in hindsight the apartment should have been re-offered."
What it cost her: €19,522.50
He'd paid her
€1,200 a month — his share of the €1,768 rent. He moved to a two-bed, two-bath flat at
€2,650, which he took on alone.
The Tribunal measured his loss as his
share of her rent against the
whole of his new one. So for eight months she's paying
€1,450 a month towards his new home —
€250 a month more than he ever paid her for hers.
He'd claimed €10,584 for the rent difference.
He got €17,022.50 —
more than he asked for. Her representative pointed out the new flat was bigger and better. The Tribunal said that without figures it "can make no findings in this regard," and charged her the full rent anyway. Nobody asked whether a man who'd been sharing at €1,200 needed a two-bed, two-bath to himself, or whether anything nearer €1,768 existed.
And it runs to
May 2027 — the end of a Part 4 cycle in a tenancy he'd already left. Eleven months of that is future loss, assumed. Which raises an obvious question. This tenancy started in 2021, so it still had a cycle end. Any tenancy created since June 2022 is of unlimited duration. On this Tribunal's method, what does the loss run to then — the tenant's retirement? His life expectancy? The only thing that would stop it is the statutory cap of €60,000.
The clock starts on the day her husband died
The Tribunal fixed 18 May 2025 —
the day of his death — as the moment she "should have offered it back" and the wrong began.
Read that again. Her husband died on 18 May. The Tribunal's position is that the offer-back was due
that day, and every day she didn't make it, the meter was running. Not after the funeral. Not after the burial. Not after the month's mind. Not after probate. Not after this poor 80-year-old had worked out what her life now looked like. The day he died. There is no compassionate allowance in the calculation — not a day, not a week, not a month. The law treats a financially struggling, bereaved woman in her eighties exactly as it would treat a fund with a compliance department, and the Tribunal didn't pause to ask whether that was what the section meant.
Then to top it off
€2,500 for the
tenant's anxiety. His treatment began in March 2025,
before the date the Tribunal itself fixed as the start of any wrong. And the harm it compensated included "the process of having to vacate" —
moving out on a notice the Tribunal never found invalid.
The hearing
She wasn't there. Her representative — not described as a solicitor — was recorded as having "little to say in evidence." He had a witness and a translator. And the report records this from the panel: "the tribunal asked why a couple in their eighties would want to move to Dublin to occupy the apartment." Think about that: an elderly couple, one of them since dead, asked in a public tribunal to justify why they wanted to live in their own apartment.
The only concession to her circumstances anywhere in the determination is 90 days to pay. No reason given. The landlord who fixed the moths in a fortnight got 14.
So
A widow in her eighties, bereaved twice in a year, whose notice nobody found invalid, is paying more towards her former tenant's bigger flat than he ever paid her — for two and a half years after he left, on a calculation that gave him more than he claimed, with the clock running from the day her husband died. Nobody will appeal it; a High Court appeal costs more than the award. Especially not an 80-year-old widow. So it stands. The RTB inflicts pain and suffering on a financially struggling 80-year-old, and the world keeps spinning.
The offer-back rule exists to stop abuse, and short-letting without offering back is what it catches. Fair enough. But a system that cannot tell the difference between a landlord who invents a reason to evict and a woman whose plans died with her husband isn't protecting tenants from anything. It's collecting. And a society that lets a State body do this to an eighty-year-old widow, and calls it tenant protection, should ask itself what it thinks it's protecting.
