The director and co-founder of the homelessness charity Trust, Ms Alice Leahy, received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from UCD today.
Ms Leahy described herself as an outsider who has fought efforts to prevent her from speaking out since she started working with people who are homeless on streets of Dublin over 30 years ago.
"The emphasis today is on making the figures look good and hence band aid-type solutions are invented which do not solve the problem but only move people on," she said when receiving the doctorate.
"Most of the people we meet everyday often find themselves homeless on the streets because they cannot fit in. They are outsiders and unless we try to make society more inclusive, more tolerant and more welcoming of people who are different, it is absurd to talk about 'solving' the problem of people sleeping rough on the streets of our cities," she said.
Ms Leahy, who is a nurse by profession, said the failure of society is rooted in a false view of health care in which little or no value was placed on the social needs of people, especially those who are marginalised.
"We all know the benefit of human contact when we are lonely for any length of time. But it may seem remarkable that absolutely no value is placed on human contact with those who maybe isolated for reasons of mental health or other problems in their lives and find themselves broken on our streets," Ms Leahy said.