Shortly after James Deeny was appointed as the Republic’s chief medical adviser in 1944, he toured the State-run county homes for people who had nowhere else to go. He found them full of senior citizens, “crippled with arthritis, often demented through malnutrition and hardship, lonely, miserable and hungry”.
“To see one poor old man just admitted, given a bowl of milk and rice … lift[ing] it to his face and devour[Ing] it like a dog shook you,” Deeney recalled, “because you suddenly realised he was starving.”
As the three experts behind this dense, gruelling but valuable history of Irish homelessness make clear, it is not exactly a new phenomenon. Emergency accommodation has become less primitive and politicians no longer call its inhabitants “vagrants” or “inadequates”, but the essential problem of how to put a secure roof over everyone’s head remains unsolved. If housing today is “our great, great, great failure” (to quote Michael D Higgins), can studying a century of previous attempts at least help us to fail better?
With this objective in mind, Eoin O’Sullivan (professor in social policy at Trinity College Dublin), Mike Allen (director of advocacy at Focus Ireland) and Sarah Sheridan (an independent researcher and lecturer) have written a methodical analysis of government homeless policies since 1922. Every major social housing bill, eviction trend and activist movement is dissected in painstaking detail, illustrated by copious diagrams. Thankfully, they also draw some striking conclusions from this solemn 261-page chronicle of facts and figures.
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To take just a few examples, housing ministers have constantly argued with the Department of Health over their shared responsibility for homeless services (as Eoghan Murphy’s recent self-lacerating memoir admitted). Individual tragedies such as the death of rough sleeper Jonathan Corrie outside Leinster House in 2014 tend to cause “panic” measures that actually make things worse. Perhaps most fundamentally, the “possessor principle” identified by venerable historian Joe Lee has seen all governments favour property rights over radical action.
Understanding Homelessness in Ireland Since Independence ends on a surprisingly positive note, with the authors insisting that a “genuine collaboration” between key State agencies can wipe it out by 2036. Although their worthy project would have benefited from more human colour and less academic prose, it’s essential reading for anyone with a role to play in breaking this vicious cycle.
