“A fair rent is a rent the tenant can reasonably pay according to the times, but in bad times a tenant cannot be expected to pay as much as he [sic] did in good times . . . ” So claimed Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell in a speech in County Mayo in June 1879. He’d insisted that agrarian tenants faced with eviction stay put — and that they join a united national campaign against rapacious landlordism.

Himself a wealthy landowner, Parnell was here aligning himself with tenants during a period of Irish history that became known as the Land War. Between 1877 and 1880, during a severe economic downturn, recorded evictions in rural Ireland rose from 980 to 2,100 a year. Barely a generation since the Great Famine — An Gorta Mór — poor Irish people were, again, facing a battle for survival.

Historic comparisons can be a risky game. But the situation facing many tenants struggling to keep their homes today has echoes of an earlier time and place. In the United Kingdom, housing and homelessness charity Shelter estimates 230,000 households are now at risk of homelessness following the lifting of the pandemic-related ban on evictions on September 21. Figures for the United States and many other countries are similarly worrying.