'Will I always be stuck in this shelter?': Homeless single adults in Cork say getting housing 'impossible'

'Two in three households on Cork City's social housing waiting list are single adults. Fewer than one in 10 homes in the city are one-bedroom homes.' File picture: Clare Keogh

Preventing single adults in the South-West of the country from falling into homelessness more than halved last year compared to the year before, as exit routes from emergency accommodation dried up.

A new Cork Simon report sets out how single adults now make up more than 80% of the households in emergency accommodation in the region, and at the end of 2025, only 5% of them left homelessness for a home of their own.

One of these people, Dara, whose name has been changed, said he had been in emergency accommodation for five years. "I can imagine now in another five years, I’ll still be waiting, which is the worst part about it," he said.

He said he became homeless through addiction, but has since become clean and got a job and was now “working away, just trying to get a gaff, trying to get somewhere on my own — it’s practically impossible".

Dara has been on the social housing waiting list for seven years, and said: “I’d take a single flat anywhere, but they’re all three-bedroom houses, and they’ll be allocated to families and stuff.” 

Private rentals are expensive and hard to come by, he said.

“You go up to the northside, and there’s whole estates, just house after house after house are boarded up," he added.

'Still Waiting', the seventh paper in Cork Simon Community's Home Truths series, highlights Government data showing that in May 2026, there were 689 people facing homelessness alone in emergency accommodation in Cork and Kerry, almost two-thirds more than three years earlier.

In 2023, one in 12 of them moved into a home of their own over the course of the year, but by the final months of 2025, that had fallen to one in 20.

More than half are now homeless for six months or longer.

Prevention, the work of stopping homelessness before it starts, has declined even more rapidly than exits, with 182 single adults prevented from becoming homeless in 2024 compared to just 88 in 2025.

For every person kept out of homelessness last year, five others came into it for the first time.

David (not his real name) said: “I am on the scared level of, will I always be stuck in this shelter? How long, where am I going to end up? That's just scary for me.

“Obviously there’s a housing crisis going on… what chance does a homeless guy have, you know?” 

Sophie Johnston, author of the Home Truths series, said: “People facing homelessness alone have been the majority in emergency accommodation in the South-West for years, and it keeps growing.

What is missing is a response built around them. The homes they need are the homes this city has least of.

“Two in three households on Cork City's social housing waiting list are single adults. Fewer than one in 10 homes in the city are one-bedroom homes.

“People are doing everything they can and still finding there is nowhere to move to.” 

She added the Government’s housing plans do not have any measures in place to address this group’s needs.

“A plan to end homelessness by 2030 cannot do it while leaving out three in four of the people who are homeless," she said.