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This chapter explores the policy and practice responses to households experiencing homelessness in Ireland, focusing on the period from 2016 to mid-2019. As noted in the previous chapter, very few other countries have experienced such a dramatic increase in homelessness in such a short space of time; thus, it allows for a detailed exploration, in a comparative context, of how policymakers respond in such circumstances. This chapter analyses the various reactive measures to the increasing number of households presenting to homelessness services. In earlier responses to homelessness, there was an ideological core to the response in that those experiencing homelessness required rehabilitation and redemption, and congregate facilities were geared towards achieving this goal. Although elements of this response remain, the current policy is best described as reacting to homelessness via a series of ad hoc interventions that are designed to minimise and mitigate the impact of housing instability and resultant homelessness on families and individuals, rather than address the drivers of homelessness. Many of the newly devised interventions around prevention described in this chapter, such as enhanced rent allowances to allow households access to the private rented sector and extending the shelter system, have contributed to moderating the flow into homelessness and keeping the numbers sleeping rough, or literally homeless, relatively low, as documented in Chapter Three. However, while valuable in their own right for the individuals and families concerned, these reactions to homelessness do not resolve the primary determinant of the residential instability experienced by those presenting to homelessness services: the housing affordability and accessibility crisis.
I first started thinking about homelessness in the late 1980s when I started working in a 15-bed male night shelter, Fairgreen House, in Galway, a medium-sized city in the West of Ireland. I was in my second year at the local university studying sociology, politics and history, and I got involved following a suggestion from a school friend. I had no idea at the time that my experience in the shelter would shape my research on homelessness, coercive institutions and the management of marginality for the next 30 years. The shelter was jointly managed by two voluntary, or not-for-profit, bodies – the Galway Social Services Council (now known as COPE) and the Galway Simon Community – and had opened in June 1983, replacing an earlier temporary shelter on the same site. In my eyes, the shelter population was largely, in Bahr and Caplow’s (1973) evocative description, a relatively small group of ‘old men drunk and sober’, but from my initial working experience, particularly on a Wednesday evening after receiving their weekly social welfare payment, they were more likely to be drunk than sober; if there was the consumption of drugs other than alcohol in the shelter, I was not aware of it. When I later conducted a statistical analysis of the users of the shelter between 1983 and 1989, I learned to my surprise that over 1,000 different individuals, ranging in age from ten to 90, had stayed there for varying periods of time (O’Sullivan, 1993), and that more than half had one, usually very short, spell in the shelter and never returned.
Measuring the number of households experiencing homelessness is difficult but not impossible. Much of the difficulty relates to defining who is to be counted as experiencing homelessness. Most countries only include those literally without any form of accommodation or residing in temporary and emergency accommodation. When it comes to those in overcrowded situations, doubled up with family or friends, or in unsuitable accommodation, a small number of countries (primarily the Nordic countries) include these households in their definition of homelessness. This is often referred to as a form of housing exclusion rather than actual homelessness in that the basic norms of what constitute adequate standards of housing and the ability to make a home are absent. Whether or not to include such households may be a political decision but, in any case, difficulties exist with measuring certain forms of housing exclusion. This has resulted in rendering comparative accounts of the extent of homelessness relatively problematic (though for recent attempts, see Busch-Geertsema et al, 2014; Allen et al, 2020). A key innovation in measuring homelessness comparatively was the development of a typology of homelessness and housing exclusion known as ETHOS by researchers at the EOH, as noted in Chapter One. This typology provides 13 categories of homelessness and housing exclusion along a spectrum of situations, ranging from being literally homeless or sleeping rough, to various forms of housing insecurity. This has allowed for reasonably accurate comparisons of different forms of homelessness and social exclusion across different countries, rather than comparing total figures, which produces wildly different numbers due to the comparative differences in defining homelessness.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The number of people experiencing homelessness is rising in the majority of advanced western economies. Responses to these rising numbers are variable but broadly include elements of congregate emergency accommodation, long-term supported accommodation, survivalist services and degrees of coercion. It is evident that these policies are failing.
Using contemporary research, policy and practice examples, this book uses the Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine homelessness as a pattern of residential instability and economic precariousness regularly experienced by marginal households. Bringing to light stark evidence, it proves that current responses to homelessness only maintain or exacerbate this instability rather than arrest it and provides a robust evidence base to reimagine how we respond to homelessness.
In this chapter, a brief historical reflection on responses to homelessness from the mid-19th century onwards is provided. This allows us to understand the relatively novel contemporary understanding of homelessness as a form of residential instability, rather than a form of individual deviancy and disability, though varieties of punitiveness remain evident in the response in some countries. Some of the historical assumptions about people experiencing homelessness also feed through to contemporary myths about homelessness. Some appear overly benign, such as claiming that we are all at risk of homelessness or that charitable giving and compassion can resolve homelessness; others are more malign, such as associating homelessness with, for example, excessive alcohol consumption and mental ill health. A key difficulty in responding to homelessness is that much of the research on homelessness is, in fact, research on the small number of people experiencing homelessness for long periods in shelters and on the streets who do have a range of disabilities, often refered to as the ‘chronic homeless’. They are also those most visible to the public, and media presentations of homelessness invariably use images of this group. However, we cannot equate chronic homelessness with all forms of homelessness, and this chapter outlines the distorting impact on policy and practice of doing so. In the post-Second World War period in most Western industrial economies, homelessness was generally seen as a residual problem largely comprised of single ageing men, a problem that would gradually wither away as welfare states broadened and deepened their reach to vulnerable households.
Based on the descriptive analysis of homelessness in the preceding chapters, this final chapter outlines why we need to rethink both our understanding of the ‘causes of homelessness’ and the appropriate policy responses that flow from this rethinking. If we think that people experience homelessness because of the ‘quality of accommodation available’ in congregate shelters and hubs, or because ‘of years of bad behaviour, or behaviour that isn’t the behaviour of you and me’, or because people are ‘gaming the system’ to unfairly obtain social housing, then responses to those experiencing homelessness will take a particular path. There is nothing new in this portrayal of people experiencing homelessness, nor is it unique to Ireland. For example, in his historical analysis of homeless men in the US, Kim Hopper (2003: 46) notes that such portrayals are an ‘old dodge’, that is: that the deepest truth about such men is that they fundamentally are different (if not unalterably so) from the rest of us. Such a canard has its motivating utilities, and expediency is one of them. So long as the appearance of unusual numbers of homeless men can be framed as a temporary aberration, the fiction can be entertained that homelessness signifies nothing other than the deranged mentalities, bad habits, or faulty coping skills of those it affects. There are somewhat more benign, but nonetheless inaccurate, claims that hold true for only a minority of those experiencing homelessness contained in the National Housing First Strategy (Government of Ireland, 2018: 9).
