Last October, a new record was set in France: 2,822 children were classified as homeless, a figure many recognised as lowballing the reality, as it related to the number of children whose parents contacted an emergency number on a specific date and failed to access a shelter. In France, which has a population of 68 million, 29,780 children are living precariously in hotels. Ireland’s population is five million. Of the 14,000 people who are now homeless, 4,316 are children. Using France’s hotel shelter figure, proportionate to population size, our child homelessness figure is almost double that of France. How? France is the third-largest host country of refugees and asylum seekers in the European Union and has one of the largest homeless populations in Europe. By any metric, it should be doing much worse than our small island.
The months go by, and the number of children forced into homelessness keeps rising. We are becoming inured to a moral and social catastrophe. This normalisation through political apathy and the repetition of blunt failure serves the Government well. They do not want people up in arms about children being made homeless. They do not want street protests that call them out on the failed housing policies that have caused this. And clearly, 4,000 children not having stable shelter isn’t a red line for the Green Party. It has not been in charge of housing policy but supports the failed policies — except for TD Neasa Hourigan, who was ostracised for rightly speaking out against the lifting of the eviction ban in 2023.
These children made homeless have no voice in public life. Their number could now fill Dublin’s Olympia Theatre 3½ times over. Kitty Holland’s reporting on the extreme health problems facing children in homelessness is essential reading (and listening to on the In The News podcast): rickets, faltering growth, scabies, anaemia and extreme tooth decay. Holland reported that the Dublin Region Homeless Executive is saying more families are spending longer in homelessness, with 26 per cent of them in emergency accommodation for two years or longer.
The shocking health problems affecting Ireland's homeless children
For years, as the numbers climbed, people working in homelessness services — and doctors, activists, Opposition politicians, journalists, charity workers and others — repeatedly warned about the vast and severe health effects that accepting, and creating, a class of child destitution without stable, long-term shelter would cause. We are now seeing what this lost decade in housing looks like and the consequential human toll on small children. Why is this not being tackled with the required urgency?
The housing crisis is as multifaceted as it is chaotic but it is, fundamentally, not complex. The shortage of public housing is at the heart of it. The State prioritised developer, global fund and corporate landlord profit over providing for a public need — funnelling money into landlord rent subsidies instead of building public and affordable housing, and all the ancillary grave errors made at a policy level. This illustrates quite clearly the ideological grip that has strangled housing in Ireland.
Homelessness itself is not complex either. It has to do with a lack of homes or a personal catastrophe that renders one’s ability to find and keep shelter very difficult. Homelessness could be broadly categorised in two ways: social and structural. Structural homelessness might refer to a lack of housing: people can’t afford or access housing and so they become homeless. This was catalysed by the lifting of the eviction ban and is the cause of so much homelessness in Ireland.
Social homelessness might refer to issues outside of the housing “market” that render people unhoused, which tend to relate to addiction, severe mental health problems, turbulent family circumstances, and also the acute needs of specific demographics such as refugees and asylum seekers.
What we have in Ireland is a series of overstretched, reactive, short-term social services — emergency accommodation — that have become embedded but do not address the structural issue. Ultimately, you cannot fix structural homelessness with social services alone. You have to address the structural problem with structural solutions. Social homelessness can also be addressed with structural solutions: provide long-term housing and wraparound social services and then people are no longer destitute. This is what happened under Finland’s Housing First policy: get rid of shelters and short-term hostels, provide housing unconditionally and people have a much better chance at permanently exiting homelessness. In Helsinki, homeless hostels were converted into permanent homes. Finland spent €250 million and hired 300 extra support workers and in the end saved money across emergency healthcare, the justice system, and social support. Shelters, hotels and hostels do not solve homelessness, but housing does. We need a children’s housing-first policy. If children were prioritised and provided for, family homelessness would rapidly reduce.
Ten years ago, there were 585 children homeless in Dublin. Now there are 3,233 in the capital, 5½ times more than that already unacceptable figure, in the space of a decade. The first section of article 42A inserted into the Constitution following the children’s referendum states: “The State recognises and affirms the natural and imprescriptible rights of all children and shall, as far as practicable, by its laws protect and vindicate those rights.” Unacceptable child homelessness in Ireland makes a mockery of this supposed constitutional recognition and affirmation.