Homeless crisis - Focus on success

What a joy it is, how uplifting it is that Focus Ireland can report that 95% of the people it supported last year were still in their homes six months after disengaging from the charity’s services. Positive intervention works.

The agency helped lift 1,065 households out of homelessness last year. The charity sustained that relationship to try to establish if the potential of the life-changing intervention was realised. That it has been in the vast majority of cases — 95% — confirms that the housing crisis is a consequence of an economic philosophy rather than human fickleness, as campaigner Fr Peter McVerry has warned on several occasions.