Irish Examiner view: So this is Christmas and what have you done about homelessness?

Today's shocking but unsurprising 'Irish Examiner' report shows that 16,700 people are living in hotels, B&Bs, and other temporary accommodation

Housing minister James Browne, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, and Tánaiste Simon Harris unveiling another housing action plan last month. 'There have been so many plans, goals, ambitions, and targets that it has all become rather meaningless, notwithstanding the genuine desire of our TDs to try and make things better.' Picture: Leah Farrell/RollingNews

And so this is Christmas. Yet, for far too many people in this country, it’s another day without their own space to call a home.

As Paul Hosford notes in today’s special report, in 2014, there were 131 families in emergency accommodation in Dublin, and it was considered a national shame.

We now have 16,700 people across the country living in hotels, B&Bs, and other such places, including children who have never lived in their own home.

Some of these have adequate supports, or are supposed to, while many have nothing at all except four walls of a room which may or may not be too small for their family.

If 131 families is a shame, what is it now? Is there even a word for it? “Crisis” seems insufficient. Housing policy overall has been great in ambition but sorely lacking in detail.

Some of the failures have been down to matters outside the Government’s control — construction inflation has seen the prices of building soar, for instance — but we have had years to get a handle on this. A decade, at least.

Instead, fortunes are paid to private operators rather than catching up with the colossal demand for housing, which we may not be able to do quickly anyway given labour shortages in construction — the Dublin Metro, for example, is expected to need 8,000 workers, and we currently don’t have them.

Still, investment in permanent bricks and mortar pays off better, in societal terms, than giving the money to companies.

Many plans. Few homes  

Our special report includes a photograph of Taoiseach Micheál Martin, housing minister James Browne, and others at the launch of the latest action plan on housing and homelessness. 

There have been so many plans, goals, ambitions, and targets that it has all become rather meaningless, notwithstanding the genuine desire of our TDs to try and make things better for all our citizens. But there is, and perhaps always is, a gap between the poetry of our idealism and the prose of our everyday reality.

As part of our special report, Alison O’Reilly spoke to three families doing their best to get through while living in emergency accommodation. 

They speak of multiple moves over multiple years, of lengthy commutes so their children can have stable schooling, of only being allowed to stay in their accommodation a certain number of nights per month, of the relentless and devastating toll on their physical and mental health.

'We are all like lost souls'

One of the people Alison spoke to, Caroline Kelly, has lived in three counties in two years along with her two children. She says: 

There are so many like me out there who just want their own place ... we are all like lost souls going around the place. 

They are the ghosts of Christmas present, and ones we should listen to.

We should be clear that just having one family in this situation is unacceptable. Most likely the UN would agree.

Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

It is true that the declaration is a statement of how things should be rather than how they are.

But if we don’t have something aspire to, to try and model ourselves toward, then what’s the point of any of it? 

How will anything ever get better? 

Aspiring to something better

Even a lone individual striving to meet the accepted standard of human rights is better than nothing.

And no matter what action plan is published and put in place, our Taoiseach has paralleled emergency accommodation with hospital waiting lists — another hardy annual where there are constant vows to address them but nothing seems to pan out. Mr Martin told the Irish Examiner:

It’s not the number on the waiting list, it’s how fast you get treated. 

“Ideally we want to prevent people becoming homeless in the first place, but then if they do get into emergency accommodation, how fast can we get them out.”

But surely, given that the last budget was supposed to include the highest investment in housing in State history, we should be aspiring to something better?

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Rethinking how we grow food

It’s a sort of good news, bad news situation — while the higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere (bad news) turn out to be helping crops become more calorie dense (good news, more calories to feed a growing population), they’re also making crops less nutrient dense (back to bad news).

They also appear to be making food more toxic, with reduced zinc and increased lead content (most definitely bad news).

Those are the results of work from the Netherlands which tested how food reacted to different levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, with the levels expected by 2065 showing crops like rice, wheat, and chickpeas start losing their protein and iron as well.

This isn’t just another study either.

It was conducted by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, which readers of Irish Examiner Farming will know has a track record of high-quality work in the field of food and agriculture.

One of the team, Sterre ter Haar, told The Guardian: “Seeing how dramatic some of the nutritional changes were, and how this differed across plants, was a big surprise.

“We aren’t seeing a simple dilution effect but rather a complete shift in the composition of our foods … 

This also raises the question of whether we should adjust our diets in some way, or how we grow or produce our food.

Adjusting our diets seems to be an approach that gets fewer results than Sisyphus pushing his stone up the hill.

Lab-grown meat has never gone beyond a niche market, and relatively few people have switched to vegan alternatives, with taste and texture often cited.

But changing how we grow our food, and what we grow, might be more realistic.

Given the importance of agriculture and agri-food to our economy, we will need to keep a very close eye on how individual crops respond to the increasingly hostile climate of this planet.

There may well be opportunities for a different mix of foodstuffs, but if there’s a trade off between keeping us full and keeping us stocked with essential nutrients, we’re only going to come out of it one way — and that’s badly off.