Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe that defines homelessness in legislation. It characterises homelessness as having no accommodation available to a person, or anyone who might reasonably live with them, or someone who is living in a hospital, county home, night shelter or other such institution because they have no other accommodation available to them.
This is quite a limited definition, omitting individuals who are on the streets, couch-surfing, women and children in domestic violence refuges, those staying with friends, sleeping in cars, parents’ box rooms and so on. These people are also excluded from official data.
Including these categories would provide a far more accurate count of those in need of housing, but brave will be the minister who opts to adopt a broader definition, given the impact it would have on consistently record-breaking numbers of homeless people. A definition that excludes those who probably should be included means policy is not led by need, but by political necessity and the avoidance of responsibility.
Homelessness is not an unusual phenomenon, but the trends are. In the last decade, it has increased by an average of 16 per cent a year, and a number equivalent to the population of Waterford – Ireland’s fifth largest conurbation – has entered emergency accommodation.
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Since 2014, official homeless numbers have increased by nearly 360 per cent. Latest figures show 15,199 homeless people in Ireland, comprising 10,541 adults and 4,658 children. (Ever obfuscating data, the Department of Housing Monthly Homeless Reports don’t provide a total number for homelessness, leaving it to the reader to calculate across various tables.)
These numbers exclude rough sleepers and the thousands with leave to remain stuck in Direct Provision or the 3,001 International Protection applicants without accommodation (a court-determined breach of the Charter of Fundamental Rights), something Simon Harris forgot when he linked rising homelessness numbers to immigration.
When homelessness numbers breached 10,000 in 2019 under Eoghan Murphy, then Opposition housing spokesman Darragh O’Brien said the figures were “disgraceful” and “a shameful and saddening example of failed Government policy”. One wonders how he feels today with official homelessness above 15,000 and real homelessness far above 20,000.
Whereas homelessness used to be a problem mainly experienced by men, there are now some 4,115 homeless women, almost 40 per cent of the total. Family homelessness is another relatively new phenomenon, increasing 480 per cent since 2014 to 2,168 today. So too are the working homeless. The last census showed that 59 per cent of those who described themselves as homeless were employed.
In a complete breach of the social contract, over the last decade having a job is no longer a guarantee of being able to house yourself.
Behind the statistics are real humans, often living with children in cramped hotel rooms, trying to get homework done, to wash clothes, to shop, feed, entertain, keep safe and support their families as well as hold down jobs and ensure their own emotional stability. Watch Paddy Breathnach’s award-winning film Rosie to appreciate the daily grind.
On the surface, homelessness is a housing problem, and a top-down housing supply recovery with too much expensive housing and not enough that most people can afford has not helped. Economic success has brought its own problems. New sources of wealth, increasing wages, property prices and rents have brought prosperity for some but also marginalised many, particularly those at the edges of society and pushed more over the edge, increasingly into homelessness.
Policies such as the Rental Accommodation Scheme (introduced in 2004) and Housing Assistance Payment (2014) have marketised welfare benefits by sending over 55,000 households (another Waterford) in need of housing out to source their own accommodation. This means the State is hugely reliant on private landlords for the most fundamental of its housing needs, which is a very risky strategy.
The typical route for those becoming homeless is eviction from the private rented sector. The moratorium on no-fault evictions during Covid slowed the rate of evictions and therefore homelessness, but is not politically-appetising post-crisis, although arguably it should be, alongside equal tax treatment for small and large landlords.
Despite the 47 per cent increase in homelessness since the 2020 election, the topic got about half the mentions in government party manifestos in 2024 that it got in 2020. Having overseen the decade-long surge in numbers, Government politicians appear hapless, helpless, clueless and shameless in the face of increasing homelessness, with some accused of trying to shift the blame on to homeless people themselves.
Many politicians have expressed their desire to significantly reduce or do away with the €303 million “homeless industry”. This is simplistic. The truth is across housing the State is as dependent on non-profit NGOs as it is on the for-profit private sector to do the heavy lifting for Government both in preventing homelessness and helping many thousands of homeless people each year (including those who never appear in statistics, such as homeless under-18s). So, knock yourself out and defund the “homeless industry”, but then what?
Beneath the supply issue lies bias and ideology. Conservative thinking – and Ireland is still a conservative country – holds that because people have personal choice, they are responsible for their own destiny in life. This is a half-baked, divisive, meritocratic philosophy that assumes everybody has equal opportunities and resources to better their lot, which they obviously don’t.
Both Thatcher and Reagan, for example, believed people are responsible for their own wellbeing, and help is only due to those who had no hand in their own misfortune, thus dividing those in need into the deserving and the undeserving.
Here, the State prefers to help those who help themselves.
This was the core of Leo Varadkar’s party of “the people who get up early in the morning” thinking, with which even Simon Coveney disagreed. In policy terms, it relieves the State of responsibility for doing everything they can for everybody they can. Finland’s previous commitment to eradicate homelessness has been dispensed with by its new conservative right-wing government who felt there were more deserving uses for the money.
When housing supply is improving, but the homeless problem is getting commensurately worse, it’s not a question of money but of ideology, priorities and a tacit acceptance of the unacceptable.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is Senior Lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
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