The recent statement that “there was basically no homelessness in Dublin” during the 1970s and 1980s by the Rome-based Dominican priest Fr Kevin O’Reilly, who attributes the subsequent increase, at least partially, to a decline in the Catholic faith, are at odds with our experience.
Our recent book, which looks at the story of homelessness since the foundation of the Irish State, reveals a very different picture of this era. In 1971, the newly formed Simon Community carried out a survey of homelessness in Dublin and identified 14 hostels with 1,310 beds for homeless adults, mostly operating at full capacity.
Providers included Dublin Corporation, the Eastern Health Board, the Legion of Mary, the Society of St Vincent de Paul, the Society of Friends, the Salvation Army and the Iveagh Trust – a remarkable range of statutory and faith-based voluntary bodies.
Six of the hostels identified in 1971 still operate today. Additional hostels were set up in response to rising homelessness among young people – some as young as 13.
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In fact, this period after Vatican II is of particular interest because of the emergence of new collaborations between faith-based and secular civic society to a campaign against homelessness. For example, the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC), established in the mid-1960s and remaining active into the early 1970s, brought together political figures such as Michael O’Riordan of the Communist Party of Ireland and Proinsias De Rossa of Sinn Féin, along with religious figures such as the Dominican Fr Austin Flannery and Jesuit Fr Michael Sweetman.
The DHAC adopted an innovative broad concept of homelessness, acknowledging families in insecure and overcrowded accommodation and linking rising homelessness with inadequate and unaffordable housing in Dublin.
The 1970s saw the foundation of the Simon Community which, although avowedly Christian in the UK, developed as a secular organisation in Ireland. In the 1980s, Focus Point (later Focus Ireland) – although founded and inspired by Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, a Religious Sister of Charity – emerged as a secular organisation, as was the case of the Arrupe Society founded by the Jesuit Fr Peter McVerry (later the Peter McVerry Trust).
While there was no robust data for this period, campaigners and commentators estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 people experiencing homelessness nationally. They were accommodated in the casual wards of County Homes (former workhouses) right until the late 1980s and in a range of shelters operated by a multiplicity of providers.
[ Record high of over 17,000 people homeless, including 5,319 childrenOpens in new window ]
Kevin Kearns, a visiting US academic researching homelessness in Dublin, described conditions in shelters for the homeless in the early 1980s in Dublin as ranging from “primitive to appalling”.
Indeed, homelessness was such a matter of public concern, that debates about how it should be defined and tackled featured in Oireachtas debates right through the 1980s, with both a Private Members’ Bill proposed by Senator Brendan Ryan, and a Fine Gael/Labour Government Bill failing to pass.
A Housing Act, finally introduced by the Fianna Fáil government in 1988, defined homelessness for the first time and set out the role of local authorities in responding to it. The legislation remains the legal basis for the much larger and more complex problem we now face.
All this civic and political attention did not come about because there was no homelessness but because it was so pervasive – and morally repugnant to Irish people.
Of course, much has worsened in recent years. The number of people in emergency accommodation, and the cost of providing this emergency accommodation, has increased exponentially over the past decade.
The numbers sleeping rough in Dublin on any given night has remained consistently lower than in comparable cities, between 100 and 200 people recorded as sleeping rough from the 1990s onward, due to this continued expansion of emergency accommodation.
[ Language used to describe homelessness influences attitudes, survey findsOpens in new window ]
Recognising that Ireland already had a serious homelessness problem in the 1970s and 1980s should not lead us to think of it as inevitable and unsolvable. Indeed our review of the issue over the 100 years since the foundation of the State brought to light the sorts of policy decisions and missed opportunities that have contributed to the challenges we now face.
A number of solutions also emerge, crucially the provision of adequate affordable housing of an appropriate size. Above all, there remains an enduring view among most Irish people that homelessness is fundamentally wrong and must be tackled.
This belief continues to be shared by people with both a religious and a secular view of our society, and continues to shape our social response to homelessness and to demand better from our political leaders.
Eoin O’Sullivan, Mike Allen, and Sarah Sheridan are the authors of Understanding Homelessness in Ireland since Independence: Decades in the Making, which was published by Policy Press last month.
