Sir, - In his Irishman's Diary of July 19th, Kevin Myers is dismissive about the State's responsibility towards homeless persons. Indeed, he is dismissive about the scale and nature of homelessness and characterises it as "the great morally unassailable issue". Mr Myers states: "The word [homelessness] has been bandied about in recent weeks as if Dublin is teeming with the homeless, as was Berlin in 1945. Not so."
Agreed. But then booming Ireland in the year 2000 is not defeated and devastated post-war Germany. It is the land of massive Budget surplus, of full employment, of two-year waiting lists for new BMWs. It is the country where some people queue to buy £1 million houses while others queue for a bed in a night shelter.
According to State figures, homelessness has doubled in Ireland in the past three years. This certainly is the experience of the Simon Community. For the 3,000 people whom Simon workers met last year, and for the estimated 10,000 people who find themselves homeless in millennium.dot.com Ireland, homelessness is not a moral issue: it is reality. It is the reality of being cast out of an ever more competitive society. When pitted against the "young, versatile and mobile" in the daily beauty contest to find a flat, they do not stand a chance.
Mr Myers's solution to homelessness is to follow Mrs Thatcher's dictum: "leave the market alone". He could hardly have picked a worse example. The Thatcher government presided over the dismantling of the UK public housing system and her non-interventionism allowed property to boom in the mid to late 1980s. Unfortunately, unregulated boom was followed by unregulated bust and 400,000 families saw their homes repossessed in the "negative equity" years of the early 1990s. People handed in their house keys to banks and building societies thinking this would discharge their debt. They were wrong.
A better model to follow might be that of our other European partner countries by encouraging the growth of voluntary and co-operative housing movements. In some EU states up to 50 per cent of housing tenure is in this "third sector". In these countries, the property market is not a fasttrack bubble to enrichment. It is a mechanism for delivering a range and variety of choice to appropriately and efficiently meet different housing needs.
Perhaps the Irish housing system could follow suit. - Yours, etc.,
Conall Mac Riocaird, National Director, Simon Community of Ireland, Exchequer Street, Dublin 2.
PS: A factual correction: Mr Myers refers to "Homeless Initiative, the voluntary ginger group". The Dublin Homeless Initiative is a partnership between voluntary and statutory agencies, established by the then Minister for Housing, Liz Mc Manus TD, in 1996. It is co-funded by Dublin Corporation and the Eastern Regional Health Authority.