Joyce Fegan: Has our outrage over homelessness been tamed?

Have we become so used, so immune, to the homeless crisis, that we have lost touch with the human beings behind the numbers?

Glen Hansard and Brendan Ogle outside Apollo House with their supporters in 2017. Although the situation has escalated in the past six years, our outrage, and our protests, seem to have eased. Picture: Sam Boal/Rollingnews

In early January 2017, a large group of people formed a human chain around a building in Dublin city centre — Apollo House. 

In the preceding weeks, the commercial building had become home to about 40 people who were homeless. On the night of December 15, 2016, a group of highly-organised activists quietly took over the building for the express use of housing people, and getting the nation talking.

The act got the nation talking, giving, agitating and volunteering. The ad-hoc occupation remained headline national news for weeks. Politicians were caught between a rock and a really hard place. 

The gates to the building were always chock-a-block with things being dropped off, everything from new mattresses to fridges and food. Up to 2,800 people applied to volunteer at the building.

Criticism and valid dissension aside, the outrage of the people against homelessness had now found a home, a channel through which to constructively act.

Back then, there were just 4,098 people living in emergency accommodation in Dublin, 2,096 of whom were children.

Today, there are nearly three times that number of homeless people in Ireland — 11,397. And 3,480 are children.

We’ve been tamed. The problem is three times worse and how is it we seem to care less?

Fr Peter McVerry said it again this month, and he has said it many times before: “The public has lost its outrage over homelessness.”

If this were a simple maths equation how would you explain such a loss of care, or outrage, in the face of swelling numbers?

Is it habituation? Has our response to the problem diminished due to repeated exposure to the crisis over 10 years?

Nine years ago we were outraged when a homeless man Jonathan Corrie died outside Leinster House, housing ministers, religious leaders, and councilors held an emergency housing summit. 

It was again headline news. There was a 20-point action plan. There was a way, but was there ever real political will?

Dr Rory Hearne, assistant professor in social policy at Maynooth University and author of new book Gaffs, Why No One Can Get a House, And What We Can Do About It, is looking to create a “cross-society movement” to bring about change. 

“This government has shown that it’s been unwilling to change its policies in any sort of meaningful direction,” said Dr Hearne in a recent Hot Press interview.

What’s clear to me is that we need to create a movement as big as Repeal, Marriage Equality and the water charges combined.

The politicians will say and have said: “We will see more completed builds this year than any year before.”

But what kind of builds? Four- and five-bed detached houses for several hundred thousand euro that serve just one out of many needs, many markets?

At a recent political party’s ard fheis, two politicians, who should have their facts at hand, gave varying figures for the number of new houses that would be completed in 2022. Their figures varied by several thousand.

Surely, if the problem is this acute, and everything is being done to address it, then we’d all know the exact number of homes coming on stream.

But politicians aside, because they generally follow the will of the people, what has happened to our outrage, as Fr McVerry says?

Are we just powerless?

Is it habituation? Is it going on so long and grown exponentially over that time that we just feel victim to it? Do we believe we are powerless to address it, so why bother caring?

That explanation might seem plausible if it were a natural disaster outside of our control, but this crisis has its roots in policy, in sustained political inaction, in an unwillingness to change ideologically.

We have become so used to figures, climbing figures quarter after quarter for going on a decade, that we have lost touch with the human beings behind the numbers.

There was a child, said Dr Hearne, who refused to go to school, not because they didn’t like it, or that they were being bullied, but in case they came back to their emergency accommodation, and it, and their parents, would be gone.

And there are “lots of stories” of children losing their hair such is the chronic stress of constantly leaving their home.

Playwright Emmet Kirwan recently spoke, and wrote, about trying to find rental accommodation for him and his pregnant partner.

They’d wake every morning, phones in hand, and search Daft simultaneously. Then there were dozens upon dozens of viewings, at the height of a pandemic, and with a baby imminent.

On the brink of fatherhood and with access to housing almost inaccessible, he turned it into Accents, a play about family and home. It sold out.

And when he was on RTÉ Radio One promoting the work and conversation inevitably turned to housing, Kirwan didn’t hold back.

We have become so used to the rising figures it no longer shocks. Picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

The “texters in” responded to one thing and one thing only — the experience of trying to find housing, and “how this guy is speaking so much sense”.

I was with my GP before Christmas, a man in his 50s who’s well settled. It was his empathy, in spite of his lack of experience, that struck me. 

He was talking about midwives who are patients of his, how hard they work, how high the pressure is and how low the pay is, and how, “they can’t even find cheap rental accommodation in the vicinity of Dublin”.

The very real stress of people unable to find housing is now landing on our GPs’ doors.

If the politicians are unwilling to change in any sort of “meaningful direction”, then it is the public who will have to demand it. 

We need to care for change to happen

But before we demand it, we need to be sufficiently outraged again and we will need to care enough again.

But how? If the homeless numbers have gone up and our outrage has gone down, where do you start?

Solutions, knowing there are solutions at hand and resources to drive these solutions, is the fulcrum our care will have to turn on.

When you become so jaundiced by a problem, understanding the real and credible solutions is the only way to inspire outrage, and therefore action, again.

Here’s hoping 2023 is the year that people get behind the proposed movement of Dr Hearne’s. 

Because behind the figures are real human beings with lives, and jobs, children and sisters, hobbies and dignity, cancer diagnoses and elderly parents, all of whom deserve somewhere safe and somewhat permanent to call home. 

Such an ideology could become reality.