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.