Election 2024: Homelessness — We have failed to treat homelessness seriously
While On Our Crisis Just More Linked Is Homes Solve Homeless Homelessness Crisis, The Will Not To Closely Delivering Of Our Its Housing Own Level
Dear newly elected and re-elected TDs,
First of all, of course, congratulations.
I am confident you already know that, on the day you take up your seat in the Dáil, there are more men, women and children in emergency homeless accommodation than ever before, and more of them have been homeless for far longer.
Just a decade ago, during the 31st Dáil, there were 344 homeless families across the whole country — today, in Dublin alone, there are more than 370 families who have been homeless for over two years.
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While you will be aware of the appalling headline, you may not be aware of the deeper problems in the shadows which threaten to make things worse: people who are homeless are being turned away by local authorities around the country because emergency accommodation is full; that the salaries of the social care workers, whose skills and commitment are at the heart of our effort to tackle homelessness, still reflect cuts imposed way back in the crash; that there are over 5,000 people whose claim for asylum in Ireland has been accepted and now face being evicted from direct provision into homelessness, with no plan between local authorities and Ipas about how to handle this.
That winter is coming and more people are having to risk their lives by sleeping on our streets than ever before.
But against this bleak background, there is something else you may not be aware of: homelessness is one of the problems that we actually can solve.
There will be many, many problems that will dominate your time until the next election, and you will spend many hours worrying about and debating issues you have no capacity to change. What you may not realise is that homelessness is one of the few major issues which can actually be tackled in the lifetime of a single Dáil.
One of the few areas of consensus around housing is that we need to build more social housing and no party promised fewer than 12,000 newly constructed social houses per year.
There are 4,800 households that are already homeless for more than six months. It seems a lot, but if we were to ringfence this vulnerable group and make them a priority for just one in 10 of those new social homes, we could end long-term homelessness in just a few years.
We could also use some of the other new social homes, better prevention and targeted arrangements with private landlords, to make sure the same problem does not build up again.
The first thing we need to realise is that, while our level of homelessness is closely linked to our housing crisis, just delivering more homes on its own will not solve the homeless crisis.
The political commitment to build more homes, shared by all parties, is very welcome and important, but on its own, it will not be enough to bring down homelessness.
Remember, we built more social homes last year than we did for many years, but few homeless households got to move into them and homelessness rose. Just doing more of the same thing will not change the outcome.
In order to turn the rising housing supply into falling homelessness, we need to carefully ringfence and target some of the new supply, and we need to also invest in other good things like mental health supports, care works, communities and community development.
When we have understood housing alone will not solve homelessness, we can understand we don’t need to completely solve the housing crisis before we start solving homelessness.
Ringfencing some of the promised supply and targeting those who are most marginalised means we can make progress on reducing homelessness at the same time as tackling the broader housing crisis.
But without such measures, even if the most optimistic building plans can be realised, mass homelessness will persist for well over a decade. Homeless people — homeless children in particular — should not have to wait until there is housing for everyone else before they can get a decent home.
Sounds easy? Well, it wouldn’t be.
There will, of course, be hundreds of challenges in delivering a plan like that.
Focus Ireland has set out a number of well-researched proposals that would solve some of those problems, but others will arise along the way. Perhaps our most important idea is about taking a totally different approach to formulating and delivering plans.
We are proposing a collaborative approach to tackling homelessness. The pattern after an election is that the winning parties go off and, after a few months and a varying degree of ‘consultation’, come up with a “Government Plan”.
Everyone who is not in government then spends their time until the next election criticising its weaknesses and condemning any commitments it made which have not been achieved.
To avoid this, governments try not to make any meaningful commitments, but despite this, they spend most of their energy defending the plan.
Any adjustment to take on board lessons or changing circumstances is treated as a U-turn and a defeat, so the government keeps defending policies that are failing. The children trapped for years in homeless accommodation deserve better than that.
What if, instead, the people who deliver homeless services sat down with the government and worked out a plan we all felt was the best that could be achieved, and then we all tried to make it work, solving together the problems that will inevitably arise?
Homeless services would also bring the voices of people who experience homelessness to the table to help solve the problem. Didn’t we learn during covid that that form of collaboration brings out the best in us?
This should not just be a government-level collaboration, it would need to be based on a broader consensus and cross-party support, and by a cross-party Oireachtas group.
For too long, we have failed to treat homelessness seriously. Some have seen it as something that will solve itself if we just build houses. Some imply it is created by forces beyond our control, so policies to eradicate it are futile. The truth is that, while homelessness is a complex and difficult issue, it is one that can be solved with good policies, persistence and a collaborative approach.
- Mike Allen is director of advocacy, research and communications at Focus Ireland