Sir, – Maeve Regan ("Why the right to housing should be enshrined in the Constitution", Opinion & Analysis, August 25th) is misguided in thinking that enshrining a constitutional right to housing would provide a solution to the appalling homelessness crisis. While the Government clearly needs to be more proactive in sorting the current mess out, the drastic solution which she proposes would create far more problems than it would solve.
In the 1988 case of O'Reilly v Limerick Corporation, Mr Justice Costello drew a distinction between "commutative" and "distributive" justice. Distributive justice, which involves the allocation of resources in the community, in Costello's view, "can only be made by reference to the common good and by those charged with furthering the common good (the government)". He goes on to say that such decisions are the province of Leinster House, rather than the Four Courts, where judges should concern themselves solely with the kind of commutative or corrective justice that the adversarial system is designed to facilitate.
A constitutional right to housing would involve the courts, comprised entirely of unelected lawyers who are unaccountable to the people, making mandatory orders against the people’s elected representatives. This situation would be, in the words of the Constitution Review Group of 1996, a “distortion of democracy”.
The expertise of judges is in the area of procedural rights, not in the minutiae of budgetary decision-making. Unless a way is found to make judges accountable in the same way as politicians, giving them vast powers to enforce socio-economic rights is not advisable. – Yours, etc,
NIALL GUINAN,
Athlone,
Co Westmeath.