Greg Daly
With over 5,000 people homeless in Ireland, Greg Daly talks to leading campaigners about the national crisis
“It’s very saddening, and a stark reality, that homeless accommodation is still with us 100 years after the establishment of our State,” President Michael D. Higgins said last September when marking the centenary of the Back Lane Hostel near Christchurch Cathedral.
Not merely is homeless accommodation still needed, however, but it’s needed more than ever. Tony Geoghegan, CEO of Merchant’s Quay Ireland and chair of the Dublin Homeless Network, says that Ireland is currently facing an “unprecedented level of homelessness, because of the wider picture and a range of factors, starting with the collapse of the private rental market which had been the biggest exit route out of homelessness.
“Anybody can become homeless for all sorts of reasons, but generally people would exit homelessness – they’d get a bit of support that would provide a kind of stepping stone, and they’d get a foot back on the ladder, getting into private rented accommodation, stabilising and moving forward,” he says, pointing out that this is increasingly difficult to do.
“Because of the lack of units, and the drying up of the housing market, and with things like the debt crisis that increased the flow of people into homelessness, the whole emergency accommodation became totally blocked,” he says, pointing to how temporary emergency beds introduced over recent years as a ‘Cold Weather Initiative’ have stayed in use as a mainstream provision.
Movement
Without units for people to move into this has been inevitable, he says, while the lack of private rented accommodation has both increased the flow of people into homelessness and decreased the movement of people out of homelessness.
Acknowledging that the Government, city councils and local authorities are attempting to address the problem, he says that official efforts to tackle homelessness “haven’t really kept pace” with what’s happening on the ground.
The figures for Ireland’s homeless crisis speak for themselves, according to Focus Ireland, who point out that Ireland’s homeless currently include more than 700 families with 1,638 children.
With 5,000 people homeless, almost a third of these being children, it’s almost unavoidable that this will be an election issue, according to Mike Allen, Director of Advocacy at Focus Ireland, the main organisation working with Dublin’s ‘new homeless’ – families who have been forced into homelessness.
“I think it should be a major election issue,” he says, stressing that, “I think housing’s going to be a major election issue because that’s affecting very broad range of people right the way through society, from people who’ve just returned to Ireland to work in multinationals who can’t afford the rent to people being squeezed out at the bottom.”
It goes beyond that, though, he says, observing that since the December 2014 death of Jonathan Corrie on Molesworth Street, just metres from Leinster House, “there is a deeper awareness in the general population about homelessness and the unacceptability of it”, describing the change in attitudes as “a sea-change”.
At the very least, he says, there has been a national change of mood such that people find current levels of homelessness to be unacceptable, “and they want to know that the party they’re voting for is going to do something about it”.
He describes this as “unusual”, saying that more normally homelessness would be a factor that would be “nice to have” when people are considering their electoral choices, “but I think it’s much more central than it was before”.
The risk, he says, is that it could become a political football. “We want it to be a political issue but not a political football – we want the sort of commitments that are made to be ones that are based on good sound policy, that can and will be delivered when the parties get into government.
“It is going to be an issue in the election,” he says, “the question is how it’s going to be debated and what sort of commitments will come out of it.”
Changed
Kristina Moody of DePaul, which provides a range of specialised services for homeless people and jointly runs the Back Lane shelter with the St Vincent de Paul society, agrees that things definitely have changed since Jonathan Corrie’s death.
“People definitely seem more aware, which is great,” she says, continuing, “we see this every day with our wonderful donors and volunteers – people want to help and they know that there’s a problem.”
Nonetheless, she makes clear, the voluntary sector can’t solve the homeless crisis on its own. “There’s obviously so much more that needs to be done structurally,” she says. “We need more housing supply as a priority and rent supplements as well haven’t kept up with the escalating rise in rents here, so we would be calling for an increase in rent supplements as well. There needs to be change on the ground.”
She feels the Government is indeed “making strides to tackle the situation”, but is adamant that “there definitely needs to be more done more quickly”.
Given how the various homelessness charities seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to explaining the factors that are fuelling Ireland’s homelessness crisis, it’s perhaps not surprising that a report earlier this month for the Department of the Environment suggested that the charities suffer from duplication and are not value for money.
The report raised the question of whether funding dozens of separate homelessness agencies is “efficient use of limited funds and the most effective mechanism to deliver services”.
“In terms of duplication, we haven’t seen the report,” Mike Allen says, pointing out that it was “a desktop exercise” in which the consultancy firm Mazer “didn’t speak to anybody – they just went through some paperwork, so you’d sort of question whether the ‘value for money’ report was really value for money”.
There are, he agrees, some questions that need to be addressed about the efficiency of the sector, but this was already known, and the report seems not to have answered these, merely reasserting that there are questions, he says.
“One of the reasons there are so many homeless organisations is because of government policy,” he adds, citing how the Government invited DePaul and Novus, for example, to set up in Ireland. Stressing that he’s not suggesting the Government had been wrong to do that, he nonetheless says “it’s a bit much to then come along and say ‘where did all these charities come from?’”
It’s not clear, he says, whether the Government “wants charities to amalgamate through collaborative mergers or to compete with each other through competitive tendering”, challenging the Government for its “inconsistency” on this point.
DePaul, which was founded in London in 1989 by the St Vincent de Paul, the Daughters of Charity and the Vincentian Fathers as a charity to work with people who are homeless, was invited into Ireland in 2002, Kristina Moody explains. “Two people who were intravenous drug users died on the streets of Dublin, and there wasn’t really a service that provided homeless accommodation for people with those kinds of needs,” she says.
“We were providing that kind of all-inclusive service in the UK, and that kind of model was needed here,” she continues, adding that DePaul was asked to come to Ireland, becoming “kind of the initiator of that low-threshold harm reduction approach to homeless services provision”.
Coalface
On the coalface of homeless provision DePaul provide a range of specialised services, she says, ranging from emergency overnight accommodation to medium-term accommodation for three- to six-month placements, helping people to get back on their feet and progress to more permanent accommodation. “We also have hostels for families and women with children,” she continues, adding, “and we also have hostels that are specialised for people with acute alcohol addictions – that would be more long term for people who’ve had entrenched periods of street drinking homelessness”.
Those hostels, she says, try to get people in off the street and help them to manage their alcohol intake. Sundial House, the Dublin hostel that provides this service, was established in 2008 and is the only service of its kind, she says.
“Our services are very specialised,” she maintains, citing how DePaul operates “the only service of its kind for women leaving prison”. The Finglas-based Tus Nua, she explains, “is a service for women leaving prison who would otherwise be homeless”. With 15 beds, she says the service “provides placements of up to six months and helps women to access more permanent accommodation and to address other issues they might be dealing with that might be impeding their access to that”.
Merchant’s Quay likewise deals with “a particular niche area in homelessness”, Tony Geoghegan says, explaining that for most people, “if you became homeless you’d go to Threshold or Respond or one of the more mainstream type social housing providers or through the local authority, but we would focus more specifically on people with drug and alcohol problems which exacerbate homelessness and make it more difficult for people to move on into mainstream accommodation”.
Generally challenging the argument that there are too many homeless charities in Ireland, he points to how “Hail (Housing Association for Integrated Living) focus specifically on people with serious mental health issues, while other housing associations would focus on people with intellectual disabilities”.
“There is a general variance across the field,” he says, arguing that having multiple providers is helpful – it provides choice and it recognises that it’s not a ‘one size fits all’ situation.
If the local housing authority were the sole housing provider and had the capacity to deal with the situation, Mr Geoghegan contends, one might wonder if it would have the expertise to deal with the multiplicity and diversity of the problem.
Funded
“Housing associations, in addition to bringing particular skill sets and expertise to the arena also contribute themselves,” he adds, “None of the housing associations I’m aware of are fully funded by the State,” citing how Simon’s funding breakdown is something like 70:30, with roughly 70% of its income being voluntary income rather than state grants.
Pointing out that all social housing providers would work closely with the Department of the Environment and the local authorities, he maintains that “choice is very important and the skills base is very important”.
Although he appreciates that from a departmental point of view it would be more straightforward to deal with a smaller number of people, he points out that “if you look at the Dublin Homeless Network, there’s about 28 organisations in the network, and they’d be a very broad church, from groups like One that specialises with ex-servicemen and women, right through to ones that deal with intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, domestic abuse…”
While the Government might well find it easier to deal with a smaller number of charities, the country’s civil servants deserve credit for what they’ve achieved, Mike Allen says. “In the last 18 months, at the civil service level,” he says, “the responsibility for traveller accommodation was put in the same very small team as the responsibility for homelessness. It’s a tribute to the civil servants who’ve been working on that that they’ve managed to achieve so much, because both of those are national crises.”
In terms of priorities for the next government, he says “this problem would benefit from considerably more investment and coordination at that level and also – and it’s a slightly separate issue – a bit more investment in research and data and record-keeping on what works.
“There have been big steps forward in terms of data being recorded since last year,” he says, “we actually know how many people are in emergency accommodation now, we never did before.”
Despite this, he says, serious data is lacking. Focus believes that one of the most positive measures that Environment Minister Alan Kelly has brought through during the current Dáil was to increase the proportion of social housing allocations that went to homeless households – 50% of social housing allocations in Dublin go to homeless households under an initiative that has been in place for over a year.
“What impact has that had on homeless families?” he asks. “We’ve done some work on that, and we’ve invested our own money that donors have given us to try and explore that issue, but the Government has done no work on that whatsoever. It’s the most significant shift of resources that has been made in recent times, and has a significant financial cost to it, but the Government hasn’t invested any money to find out if it works.”
Describing himself as “constantly baffled” by governmental unwillingness to find out what works, he says that looking at Focus’ research budget for the year, he suspects Focus Ireland “invests as much into researching causes and solutions for homeless as probably everybody else in the country put together”.
Even without serious research to draw on, homelessness charities can see the situation worsening on the ground, however. Tony Geoghegan points to how the Night Café set up a year ago was intended as a short-term intervention, but has been consistently full, often accommodating up to 70 people a night, when the intended cap was about 50.
“The City Council has agreed to support it for a second year,” he says, “but the concern is that it like other emergency accommodation, what was meant as an emergency provision will become mainstream.”
Commodity
Arguing that housing has become “a commodity rather than a basic human need” in Ireland, he says that it should be regarded as a basic human right, and one that the State has a role in vindicating.
“You’d think that in this centenary year that we would be looking at things like that,” he says. “What kind of society do we want to have? Society is more than just a market.”
While Mike Allen believes that it’s really only been in the last 15 years that Irish people have begun to treat housing as a commodity, he says that the 1916 centenary – which Archbishop Eamon Martin has described as offering an opportunity to ask what kind of society we want Ireland to be – should cause us to recall how among the social conditions that led to unrest in the run-in to the Rising was poor housing and urban squalor.
“This would be a good time to reflect on the role of the home in Irish society,” he says, observing that “we tend to think that Irish society is more cohesive and caring than it is, but through most of our independence we’ve managed to get by by making very large numbers of people leave”.
Jonathan Corrie’s death, symbolically on the doorstep of our national parliament, helped crystallise a shift in public consciousness that has kept attention on the issue of homelessness. Today’s spotlight tends to be on the ‘new’ issue of family homelessness, he says, conceding that Focus has played a role in that, but he warns against people forgetting the many others who are caught in Ireland’s homelessness traps.
“People should be able to look at more than one thing at a time,” he says.