Policy papers and strategies should not just be taken at face value. They must be read with a critical eye to reveal their hidden meanings or obscured agendas. Their true meaning will emerge via an interpretation in which suspicion plays a crucial role.

Hope that things will change for the better is part and parcel of events like COP. If change was not possible, if the situation was truly hopeless, these meetings would not happen. What we need now alongside our hope is the will to take action.

The recommendations in the Kenny Report from 1973 could have prevented, or at least mitigated our current housing and homelessness crisis. So why were those recommendations ignored? asks Peter McVerry.

Whether they wanted it or not, this Government’s fortunes are inextricably linked with housing.

A decade into the most recent Irish housing affordability and homelessness crisis, few adjectives or perojatives have not be used. We want to propose a new word for describing these events: apocalyptic.

Social theologian and Director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice Kevin Hargaden told Ruadhán Jones of The Irish Catholic that the “homelessness catastrophe, which has plateaued largely because of the eviction ban,will now almost certainly jump – unless there’s a mass intervention on rent arrears”.

Following a 10-day “grace period” after the blanket eviction ban ends today, April 23rd is the date when evictions can resume in the private rental sector.

We can see that the claims that landlords are fleeing the Irish housing market is false. There is no grand exodus. And the stable numbers of landlords have less debt and more revenue than they have had in the past.

To address the problem of homelessness, we obviously need to understand the causes and nature of it.  Unfortunately, there are some myths about homelessness, even amongst decision-makers, which prevents the problem from being resolved, says Peter McVerry SJ.

This blog post is the final of a three part series on policy-making as storytelling. In this week’s piece, Keith Adams considers how to make further sense of the stories around homelessness by looking at the sources of the housing which families enter into as they exit homelessness and how we can end homelessness.