Since Focus was set up, most people are better off but the homeless feel even more excluded, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy tells Carl O'Brien

So much has changed. It's more than 20 years since Sr Stanislaus Kennedy was editor of a book on poverty entitled One Million Poor? A quarter of the country was on the breadline. Unemployment levels were five times higher than they are now. And emigration was the only hope for young Irish.

Today, we've never had such low jobless numbers. We're one of the richest economies in the world. Immigration has taken over from emigration as an issue. Our young people have more money and more opportunities than ever before.

So much has changed. And yet, when Sr Stanislaus Kennedy looks around the chaotic, traffic-choked streets of the capital, she sees a much more forbidding landscape than she did 21 years ago. It's a wild and angry place. People are better off, but they've less time for one another. The poor and the homeless are still there, but they're invisible.

"If you were down and out in the 1980s, people knew you and they related to you," says Sr Stan. "It was a friendlier place. Fewer people are poor now, but they are more excluded. The gap between rich and poor is widening.

"Now, in the fast-moving city-centre buzzing life, the homeless feel more excluded than ever before. In many ways it's much more difficult for people to make their way in society. It is really disappointing to see our society develop the way it has. You can see it has got rich, but the people left behind are more and more removed from the centre. They are more marginalised and excluded."

Amid much of the complacent and self-congratulatory commentary about Ireland's economic success, Sr Stan's is a discordant voice. But then, for much of her life, she has sought to highlight uncomfortable truths.

BORN IN DINGLE, Co, Kerry in 1940, Sr Stan - or Treasa, as she was christened - was the fourth of five children in a small farming family. She recalls that she didn't have a religious vocation as such. That came later.

"I was very conscious of inequalities in Dingle. The people who had things and the people who didn't. I had read about the poverty in the cities. I became a nun to enable me to work with the poor. That's what attracted me to the Sisters of Charity. Later on, the spirituality of the life attracted me to stay on."

She went on to initiate - with the then Catholic bishop of Kilkenny, Dr Peter Birch - the Kilkenny social services council, which brought together social and statutory agencies for the first time in a structured way to try to improve the delivery of help to those in need.

Some years later, at a conference on poverty in the 1970s, she attacked complacent church attitudes toward the poor, how nuns and priests placed themselves above the marginalised rather than treating them on the same level. The paper caused a furore and criticism from the hierarchy.

While her comments have often been controversial, at the heart of much of her commentary has been a clear-sighted vision of how to tackle the social problems which to many can often seem overwhelming. Instead of simple charity, she has campaigned for a much more powerful concept: social justice.

It's 21 years since Sr Stan founded an organisation operating from the top floor of a rented house in Temple Bar, a charity which went on to become one of the largest homeless organisations in Ireland - Focus Ireland.

She had come to Dublin to study the extent of women experiencing homelessness. After writing a major research project, she went on to spend a year living among eight of them. The experience had a profound effect on her.

"It was a real eye-opener," she says. "There was the awful business of not having a place to stay. But for them the worst part was the way their whole dignity and self-respect was eroded. They were treated differently because they were homeless. They soon found themselves with no sense of self-worth after a short time of being on the street.

"I listened to what they had to say and to what they needed. There was no drop-in service, no advice centre, no safe place for homeless women to get food. They needed a place to sit down and talk. They needed a 24-hour phone service. That was at the end of 1985.

"So we took over the rest of the building on Eustace Street [ now the Focus Ireland cafeteria] and went about setting up exactly what those women said was needed. When we opened the doors, men, women and children started coming in because there was nowhere else to go. We called it Focus Point, because we decided it would become a focal point for people to go to in the city.

"It became a centre that was safe with good quality services. I always said they need the best. Only the best is good enough. If you were running a travel agency, we'd have the best service for people who'd come in, looking for information. Similarly, we wanted the information and advice there to be of the highest quality."

In doing so, the organisation pioneered a way of working with homeless people: involving them in the provision of services, identifying their needs, and helping them to move out of homelessness. Soon Focus Ireland opened its first development of low-rent, good-quality long-term and short-term housing in Dublin. It has since expanded to provide housing and service projects in other parts of Dublin, Limerick and Waterford.

"And that's the way Focus is today, although it is bigger and more professional. It has continued to provide that continuum of services, ranging from crisis services to specific supports for young people, families and children."

One thing which has changed since the 1980s is the Government's interest in homelessness. While once it was an issue left to the voluntary organisations, the State has helped establish the Homeless Agency, which plans and allocates services in the Dublin area.

Most money spent on providing services to homeless people by voluntary organisations is money provided by the State. For example, almost €10 million of Focus Ireland's budget of just under €15 million is Government money.

Services for homeless people have changed. There is now, in many campaigners' views, sufficient emergency accommodation for all homeless people in Dublin. The numbers sleeping rough have fallen from the high point they seemed to reach in the late 1990s.

Official figures suggest that homelessness in the capital has been reduced by 20 per cent in the past three years. Sr Stan says the reality is more complex. While she welcomes progress made - such as in the provision of emergency shelters - she feels homelessness is as big a problem now as it was in the 1980s.

People tend to stay in homelessness longer. And the profile of the homeless has changed. What was once seen as the domain of middle-aged men and a few women has grown into the misery of men, women and children of all ages. The drug problem, virtually nonexistent among the homeless population in the early to mid-1980s, is common. Mental health problems are high among the homeless as well.

HOWEVER, THE biggest failure over the past 21 years, she says, is the lack of Government commitment to build sufficient social housing. Whereas once social housing accounted for up to 20 per cent of housing output, it has fallen to a low of around 7 per cent. Housing waiting lists, once manageable, now have more than 40,000 households waiting for a place to call home.

"It's disappointing because we have a great opportunity to change everything," she says. "While things have improved, the kernel of the problem is housing and poverty. We will always have a flow of homelessness, for reasons of family or marriage break-ups or whatever. But we don't have to have a situation where people remain in homelessness.

"It's important to distinguish between a stage of homelessness and a state of homelessness. If you're too long in the state of homelessness, you begin to lose hope and it becomes a way of life. We have people in this situation because we haven't got the housing to move people on. The amount of Government investment in the homeless population has been huge. What has not happened is the housing. We don't need to have housing waiting lists: it could have been resolved by investing in good quality social housing over the years, but it hasn't. And they're still not keeping pace. We need 10,000 units a year for the next five years."

Things may get worse before they get better, she warns. Our new-found prosperity will bring new challenges in meeting the needs of homeless people, especially those from abroad.

"There is no doubt that foreign nationals are going to be a growing part of the homeless population. They have difficulties accessing social welfare, they fall out of the system and they hope to get back into work . . . It's a population which is going to increase."

While bleakly realistic, she remains optimistic over the future. At a time when society seems ever more selfish and young people are vilified for all kinds of excesses, Sr Stan, again, sees the other side of the coin. "The young people I see are vary committed to changing things for the better. We have a great staff and volunteers," she says. "The organisation has retained that idealism and freshness of approach. We see it in the way it responds to new challenges and meets different needs. At its core are the values of dignity and empowerment . . . It defined our work in the past and will continue to define it into the future."