Greg Daly
Parishes and comunities need to take responsibility for tackling the country’s housing crisis, leading homelessness campaigners have said, calling for pressure to create political will around the issue.
“Trying to get people out of homelessness while others are coming into it is like trying to empty bathwater with the taps full on,” Fr Peter McVerry SJ told The Irish Catholic, maintaining that State and local authorities are building nowhere near the number of houses necessary to stem the tide of homelessness.
Reluctance
“What they’re doing is they’re building six here and they’re buying five there – that’s never going to sort things. What we have to do is go back to the 70s when we were building thousands of social houses,” he said, adding: “There is a huge reluctance to go down the road of social housing, but there is no other solution. If we want to get out of this, there is no other solution.”
This reluctance stems partly from an unwillingness on the part of local authorities to manage large social housing projects, and partly from issues around planning permission and electoral support for councillors, he explained.
“If you have a large-scale social housing project the whole world is going to object to it,” he said. “The neighbours are going to object to it, and the local councillors are looking at the next election and they don’t want to be seen to be supporting a big social housing project – so they’re very reluctant to give planning permission for social housing projects.”
“It’s NIMBYism everywhere you go,” he said, adding that localised ‘not in my back yard’ attitudes tend to extend not merely to social housing but to ‘affordable housing’.
Homeless figures in Ireland would have topped 11,000 people by now if the system for counting the country’s homeless had not been changed last year, according to Focus Ireland’s advocacy manager Mike Allen, who believes reluctance to face problems at a local level must be overcome if shortages in housing supply are to be addressed.
“We need to deliver around 35,000 new homes every year to stand still,” he told this newspaper, continuing: “We probably only delivered around 18,000 last year, so we’re a long way even from standing still.”
Calling for this to be sped up, he said there’s a serious paradox in how people across Ireland recognise that the country is facing a housing crisis that must be addressed while often opposing building projects in their areas.
“That really needs to be accelerated, and that involves things like local communities, local politicians and so on not objecting to every development in the area that’s proposed, because there’s a real contradiction between the widespread desire for a public solution to the housing problem, and the localised resistance by local communities to every proposal to actually build homes,” he said, adding “That has to change if we’re to deal with this problem.”
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