Irish Travellers are overrepresented in homelessness services and Traveller families can be left in emergency accommodation for years, which adds another level of trauma to the institutional abuse they have endured for decades. In a group whose suicide rates are several times that of the settled community, the impact of every factor which impacts upon mental health must be lessened, making the provision of secure, appropriate housing for Travellers a matter of urgency. 

Travellers are overrepresented in homelessness emergency accommodation and also comprise part of the ‘hidden homeless’ in Ireland; people who are living in precarious or overcrowded housing. Traveller families with children are often left lingering in emergency family hubs for far longer than families from the settled community before being offered homes. When they are offered homes, these are often inadequate or ill-suited to their needs. Travellers who try to get tenancies in private rented accommodation face discrimination and have applications rejected.

The reasons for turning down one or more offers of social housing are the concern of the homeless person or family involved, and this is not why the homelessness situation is “complicated”. It is complicated because of the reticence to solve it, by automatically placing homeless people in [actual] social homes for fear of a cascade effect where there is a rush of people declaring themselves homeless. This is the anxiety expressed in the 2017 Welfare cheats… campaign – the unfounded fear that the people at the bottom of society are taking advantage of us all, when our real fear is that we might some day be those people

If land that has been identified for the RZLT was instead purchased by local authorities using the CPO mechanism and used to build public housing, it would be a step in the right direction.

This issue is not only affecting the property market for potential buyers. Land hoarding and speculation also affects the delivery of social housing. Higher land values consume a significant part of the budget of AHBs – who deliver much of our social and affordable housing – and directly impact the final cost of the houses and apartments. This has an obvious immediate impact on how many units they can deliver. It is also an issue when calculating the financial outlay for affordable and cost-rental housing, which in turn affects the price of sale or rent of a unit and the overall long-term sustainability of a scheme.

A house or apartment that is owned by someone who does not live in it, is not that person’s home, but it is their property. If the property has a tenant living in it, it is now their home, even though they are not the owner.

There are – still – more than 11,000 people homeless. Homelessness figures have been record-breaking, (you might say exceeding their targets) for six months in a row.  But the Government’s targets for social housing have not even been met, never mind exceeded. This fact has been further compounded by the Department of Housing’s reported underspend of €340 million in its housing budget for last year, which raises further questions about the Department’s capacity and determination to lessen the severity of this crisis. 

Letting people know, in simple terms, what they are entitled to and how to get it is the basic level of public service that we should be able to expect from Government.

Optimism has its place but the reality of the current housing and homelessness issue should not inspire it.

Most people want a speedier, more efficient planning process, but we must consider the question of who it will be benefit most. Will it be better for local communities, for the environment, for biodiversity, for climate action? We need more housing, but we also need climate action and the former cannot compromise the latter.

Weeks of relentless advertising have started, all designed to part people from their money at this, ‘the most wonderful time of the year’. But there’s nothing wonderful about it for the 11,000 people who are homeless, or for more than 3,000 children who will spend it in emergency accommodation. What kind of Christmas are they going to have?

Even when landlords are not selling up, tenants in private rental accommodation have limited security. One recent example reveals that private tenants in receipt of HAP don’t have the same security of tenure as someone in local authority housing, yet subsidising tenants in private rentals has been used by the State for years as a substitute for directly providing a functioning social housing system.

Homelessness organisations and others in the non-profit sector have always been involved in advocacy and therefore in shaping government policy. This report continues this practice not only by its analysis of the two most recent Irish housing strategies but also by examining international examples of housing and homelessness policy.

A referendum on the right to housing would reflect what our values as a society are, at this point in time.

Nobody in a wealthy country should face poverty in their last years simply because they have not managed to buy property. We need to pressure this Government to deliver a viable housing alternative that will benefit people who are not interested in gaining an ‘asset’, but simply want a home.

What linked all of the presentations was the theme that the Irish housing and homelessness crisis not only could have been averted but can also be solved. All that is missing from the Irish context and present in Finland, for example, is the political will to do so.

This time the social housing prototype that is being implemented half-heartedly in Ireland is cost rental housing. The ‘Vienna Model’ is considered the blueprint for public housing that is affordable, high-quality and desirable and – even though Dublin City Council hosted an exhibition about it in 2019 – to date its implementation here bears only a faint resemblance to the original. This failure to fully embrace the vision is unlikely to result in success.

What does it take to make the mental leap to put ourselves in a homeless person’s shoes? To see that it’s the same problem – ‘decent, hardworking’ people are becoming homeless because rents are too high and they can’t even think about buying a home or saving for a deposit.

Loss and Adaptation day at COP26 was marked by an Ecojesuit webinar about climate change impacts in Oceania and Asia, and a JCFJ school talk about the interrelationships between climate change effects

It’s so cold I can’t feel my hands well enough to even tweet, but being at the Glasgow climate march is worth it.

  A gallery of photos from yesterday’s COP26 Global Day of Climate Justice in Glasgow. Exact numbers are hard to estimate – some reports say up to 100,000 people attended – and bystanders said it was the biggest march they had seen in Glasgow since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. The weather… Read more »

  Today [5th November], the theme of COP26 negotiations in the Blue Zone is ‘Youth and public empowerment – Elevating the voice of young people and demonstrating the critical role of public empowerment and education in climate action’. Whether by coincidence or design, it also happens to be a Friday, and there is a massive… Read more »

“When leaders call us amazing they are handing over responsibility to us” adding that “I hand the responsibility right back to them”.

  On arriving in Glasgow, I met someone for lunch and then made my way to the train station in Argyle Street where I attempt to buy a ticket to the COP26 site on the quays of the Clyde. But as Robert Burns would say “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang… Read more »

The pilgrims will walk along the Union Canal between the two cities and are expected to arrive in Glasgow on the morning of Saturday 6th November, in time to merge with the Rally for Climate Action – the biggest gathering of the 12 days, predicted to attract up to 100,000 people.