Our Impact
Mercy Law Resource Centre (MLRC) works with individuals in housing crises to help them overcome legal barriers to safe, secure housing. It is the only free legal service in Ireland dedicated to homelessness and social housing law.
Key Services
MLRC achieves its impact through four key services:
Free Legal Advice
We provide legal advice and representation through outreach clinics, phone, email, and video calls, tailored to the client’s needs. We highlight some of our clients’ experiences in the Case Studies section below.
Legal Support and Training
We assist organisations and professionals, such as social workers and domestic violence services, empowering them to better support their clients.
Free Legal Representation
Clients receive representation before tribunals and courts.
Policy Work
We empower those who are homeless or at risk to assert their rights and advocate for changes to laws and policies that adversely affect them.
The core of MLRC’s work is providing free legal advice and representation to individuals facing homelessness or housing instability. Since our inception in 2009, our network of legal advice clinics and outreach has significantly impacted the community. Our legal casework informs our strategy and shapes our policy advocacy and training programmes.
Service Reach and Demand
In 2023, MLRC served more clients outside Dublin (54%) than within the city (46%), reflecting our growing national reach. We conducted 27 in-person legal clinics, primarily in the Liberties CIC – Carmelite Outreach, serving 37 households. We also launched four clinics in partnership with Crosscare, catering to nine households from migrant backgrounds.
While we primarily provide advice over the phone or online, in-person clinics remain crucial, especially for vulnerable clients facing language barriers or literacy issues. The demand for our services continues to grow, with over 750 requests for legal assistance in 2023—a 35% increase from the previous year. Our call volume surged by 29% to 2,740 calls, with projections for 2024 indicating a 17.5% rise in calls compared to the first half of 2023.
We opened 354 new client files in 2023, with 257 related to social housing and 108 to other issues, including 108 inquiries about homelessness. Notably, 81% of these inquiries involved access to emergency accommodation (EA), highlighting significant issues within the EA system, particularly for individuals with health or disability needs. Alarmingly, MLRC received 139 queries about emergency accommodation, up from 54 in 2022, with over 50% of these cases linked to domestic violence.
Publications and Reports
In 2023, we published the second and third reports in our “barriers” series, focusing on the challenges faced by vulnerable groups seeking access to social housing and homeless services. The reports, “Mental Health and Social Housing” and “Social Housing Domestic Violence and the Public Sector Duty,” provided practical recommendations for change.
In September 2024, MLRC published “Excluded and Left Behind: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Family Homelessness among Minority Ethnic Families and Its Effects on Their Children.” This report offers an in-depth qualitative analysis of the unique challenges faced by minority families and the impact of prolonged homelessness on their children, highlighting the trauma and discrimination disproportionately affecting Travellers and migrants in long-term homelessness statistics.
