Making and unmaking home in the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative research study of the experience of private rental tenants in Ireland

Abstract The intersection between Covid-19, housing and inequality has played an important role in the pandemic, particularly in the private rental sector (PRS). This article draws on qualitative research in Ireland to examine tenants’ experiences of ‘home making’ and ‘home unmaking’ during the pandemic. It explores the structural and everyday processes that shaped tenants’ experience of ‘home’, and identifies the factors which undermined that experience. Our research finds that the Covid-19 pandemic collided with an existing set of structural inequalities in the PRS, including those related to insecurity, poor quality dwellings and inability to control or adapt dwellings. Analysing how the structures of the rental sector interacted with the impact of Covid-19, as well as with everyday practices and experiences of home making and home unmaking, re-centres home in order to make visible the politics of home in the context of the pandemic. The article suggests that equality of housing and home needs to be ‘baked in’ to our housing systems to avoid the kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic between external shock and pre-existing inequalities identified in the present research.