Within a week, two comments, one by the current Taoiseach Simon Harris and another by his predecessor, Leo Varadkar, have added to the sense of frustration about the increasingly toxic moment Irish society finds itself in. Both comments were foolish – Harris talking about how homelessness figures are “heavily impacted by the fact that we are seeing many people seek protection in our country”, and Varadkar saying “the majority of people think that the [immigration] numbers have been too big in recent years, and they’re right”. But they are nevertheless worthy of interrogation.
No one in Fine Gael wants to highlight the actual cause of homelessness, which is a dearth of homes, and the outcome of policies underpinned by the ideological and literal divestment of the provision of housing from the State’s obligations.
According to Dublin Region Homeless Executive’s figures, published in monthly reports, between January and the end of July of this year, 223 new families presented as homeless in the Dublin region because of notices of termination. During the same period, illegal evictions were recorded in the report as the reason eight families presented as homeless. Just 13 families cited leaving direct provision as the reason, and 12 were listed as “newly arrived from abroad”. Given that a family is more than one person, the actual number of people being made homeless because they’re being evicted is multiples of 223. In July of 2024, for example, the number of families in emergency accommodation in the Dublin region was 1,488, made up of 2,564 adults and 3,289 children. That means the average family size in emergency accommodation that month was 3.9 people. This represents an 11 per cent increase compared with July 2023, 141 more families, including 381 more homeless children.
Between January and the end of July, 305 single people who presented as homeless cited leaving direct provision as the reason for it, with 150 single people citing notices of termination.
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Taken together, these figures suggest the main reason for people presenting as homeless in Dublin this year is not that they were leaving direct provision or newly arrived from abroad, it’s because they were evicted. And they found themselves evicted because the Government lifted the eviction ban when every single Minister at Cabinet and every single backbencher in Government had been warned that it would cause unimaginable turmoil, disruption and trauma in people’s lives. An increase in homelessness was only ever going to be the outcome of their actions. It was foretold, forewarned, forecast – and they did it anyway.
There is a sentence highlighted in bold in July’s report, and it’s this: “Fewer families exiting homelessness accommodation to tenancies is the main driver of the increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in the Dublin region.” It is family homelessness that is driving the increase in general homelessness in Dublin, and the bulk of that is caused by notices of termination, aka evictions.
As for those leaving direct provision and becoming homeless, it’s not their fault. They’re contending with the same chronic and chaotic rental crisis as everyone else. The reason they’re becoming homeless is not because leaving direct provision is an automatic pathway to homelessness, it’s because it’s virtually impossible to find anywhere to rent in Dublin, and certainly nowhere affordable. And these people have it worse than many.
They are far less likely to have family supports and community networks, far fewer opportunities to move in with a cousin or a granny or a neighbour as so many other victims of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s housing crisis do. They are far less likely to have a circle of friends in whose homes they can couch-surf for a while. They are much more likely to have lower incomes – if any – given the constraints on their capacity to work, language barriers, trauma and paltry welfare supports.
[ ‘Massive air of desperation’ among young people at scale of housing crisisOpens in new window ]
Not only that, refugees and asylum seekers are also contending with racism, street attacks, harassment, hateful protests and intimidation, the very emergency accommodation they are shunted into being burned out in arson crime waves. And a political establishment shouting “look over there!” any time someone mentions the actual source of the housing crisis is Government policy.
Racist agitators are leveraging the housing crisis for their primary slogan, “Ireland Is Full”. Would what we’re seeing now, including mob violence, be happening if there were no housing crisis? Potentially not. But that also lets people off the hook. Fundamental to this unhinged ethnonationalism is racism and xenophobia. What is the Government doing about that?
The national action plan against racism (NAPAR) was launched in March 2023. An implementation report was published last month. One action was to “carry out a programme to raise public education and awareness in support of the objective of this plan”. Public awareness campaigns are essential and urgent, a very basic thing needed to at least try to counter racism and anti-immigrant hate. This was the update: “DCEDIY [the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth] has engaged in preliminary talks with its media unit to create a plan to carry out a programme to raise awareness in support of the NAPAR.” Why the delay? Surely that’s a piece of work that could be done in a fortnight.
[ Fintan O'Toole: There’s one fundamental reason why we have a housing crisisOpens in new window ]
Prepare yourselves, because we’re going to hear a lot more about how it’s refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants who are negatively impacting the demand for housing, not the policy that underpins the housing shortage. It’s a tired and cynical cliche, and a populist mode of electioneering.