Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice · “Family Hubs” Lives On Hold Introduction Many policy changes in Ireland in recent years have been launched and branded in terms of “hubs”. The language and proximate adjectives are attractive to policymakers. Hubs are innovative, dynamic, and quick to change and adapt to new opportunities and potential. Yet,… Read more »

As the community and voluntary sector is increasingly shaped by the need to constantly generate evidence of outcomes, practitioners can become attuned to the expectation of the “knowledge” which should be produced.

In the early 1990s, Professor Anthony Clare addressed a Dublin conference audience of some 300 people. It was an inspiring address and among the words that resonated were the following: “‘The elderly’ are not ‘them, out there’; ‘the elderly’ are us, writ large writ later.” Pithy and fundamentally true, it is a good starting point… Read more »

Dalma Fabian INTRODUCTION Rates of homelessness are rising in almost all EU countries with a 150% increase in Germany from 2014 to 2016, a 20% rise in the number of people in emergency shelters in Spain over the same period, and an 8% increase in Denmark between 2015 and 2017. In the Netherlands 4,000 children… Read more »

Cian O’Callaghan Cian O’Callaghan is Assistant Professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin. His recent research, which was funded by the IRC, has concerned the impacts of Ireland’s property bubble and associated crisis, with a particular focus on housing. What your sandwich says about you In a well-known advert for Bank of Ireland, a young… Read more »

Jerome Connolly Introduction There is in the Sherlock Holmes canon a particular and often-quoted phrase which comes to mind when scrutinising the housing policies of successive Irish governments over the last two decades. The phrase refers to an incident concerning a dog guarding stables from which a racehorse had been stolen during the night. The… Read more »

Peter McVerry SJ, Eoin Carroll and Margaret Burns Homelessness The Continuing Rise in Homelessness The most disturbing aspect of the current housing crisis is, of course, the extent to which individuals and families are experiencing homelessness. While homelessness has been rising since at least 2013 there has been a particularly marked increase since 2015. As… Read more »

Margaret Burns, P.J. Drudy, Rory Hearne and Peter McVerry SJ Introduction Providing affordable, quality and accessible housing for our people is a priority … The actions of the New Partnership Government will work to end the housing shortage and homelessness. (Programme for Government, May 2016) Against a background of deepening public concern about the increasing… Read more »

When Ireland became an independent State it inherited some appallingly bad housing conditions. This was most notoriously the case in the severely deprived areas of inner-city Dublin, but inadequate and overcrowded housing which lacked basic facilities was also prevalent in towns and villages and rural areas around the country. Over the following seven decades, significant… Read more »

‘Have youse (yis) no homes to go to?’ – the traditional, plaintive cry of long-suffering publicans, trying to clear their premises after closing time, can sound somewhat hollow and ironic to many in today’s Ireland. We live at a time when housing supply does not meet demand; when, in the wake of the collapse of the property bubble, home-owners may struggle to meet mortgage repayments and many fear re-possession; where those in negative equity may find themselves unable to move from their current home even when there are pressing family or financial reasons for them to do so; where waiting lists for social housing are at an alarmingly high level, and where many are unable to access or remain in private rented accommodation because of unaffordable increases in rents in many areas.