The report this week which indicated that the extent of homelessness is far higher than previous surveys suggested has been met with much hand-wringing but little in the way of specific commitments to remedy the situation. In many ways this is understandable. To tackle the problem of homelessness it is necessary, as the Simon Community so often points out, to tackle the problem of housing. The main focus of the housing crisis in the media has been on the difficulty facing middle class couples who cannot afford to buy their own homes. But, it is important to note that beyond this group there are many others who can never begin even to contemplate entering the housing market.
These are the people who would have been housed in the big housing estates that used to be built by local authorities until the debt crisis of the 1980s put an end to house-building on that scale. Today, they appear in their tens of thousands on housing lists, creating a pressure on accommodation which makes it virtually impossible for the marginalised to afford even poor-quality rented accommodation. Indeed, many do not even try. Most of the 1,350 people recorded as contacting services for homeless in the week of the Dublin/Kildare/Wicklow survey had never applied for local authority housing.
The same pattern is evident in Galway. Of the nearly 1,000 people whom Galway Simon classified as having been homeless at some time last year, very few are on the housing list. It is for these reasons that the voluntary groups concerned with homelessness this week called for a major investment in social and public housing. This presents difficulties for policy-makers, as a return to large-scale building by local authorities would be very expensive. It is a matter of priorities.
Many of the people who contribute to our economy do so on very low wages indeed. In the social democracy in which we live, their needs are as important as those of the prosperous and powerful. If we wish to foster and nurture that social democracy, we must accept the imperative to invest in such basic needs as housing. When the political decision is taken, other practical difficulties will need to be addressed. For instance, Dublin Corporation has limited space on which to build houses and may have to seek to build in neighbouring counties. That would give rise to a new set of its problems - not least the objections likely to be raised by residents of those counties.
These and other difficulties, daunting though they may be, must be confronted. A society which is unable or unwilling to meet the real needs of its citizens will pay a high price. Already we see a gathering fragmentation in society, with marginalised groups becoming almost invisible, even to their neighbours. This week's report showed us one outcome of that fragmentation. What is needed now is a determination to tackle the underlying issues; a decent and cohesive society must be paid for.