Letters to the Editor: Trapped in a temporary and unsustainable housing situation
A letter writer feels there is 'no solution going forward, despite my best and most strenuous efforts over many years'.
Thank you for your excellent article on homelessness (Special report: Faces of homelessness have been changing over the last decade, June 8).
I am one of those not in the statistics but trapped in a temporary and unsustainable housing situation (occupying holiday accommodation through the kindness of friends), with no visible solution going forward, despite my best and most strenuous efforts over many years.
The progression of government policies for 20 years and the legacy of everything that caused the 2008 crash show a straight line of cause and effect for me, but it feels only extraordinary to note that roughly the same approaches continue to prevail.
I am a moderate- to low-income worker in this economy who should in any normal circumstances have been able to provide for myself.
However, no matter how hard I have tried, sometimes working three jobs at a time, I cannot keep up with the Government’s stolid and persistent favouring of economic approaches which do not work on human, social, or just principles, but concentrate on a fallacy often attached to wealth creation that is causing havoc across our world.
I cannot compete no matter how hard I have tried and am not alone in perceiving that since 2008, I am squeezed more while working harder, and that all goods, services, and living costs are in acceleration because the Government has abandoned its social conscience and is, underneath the talk, indifferent to the crises in housing, health, and almost every other aspect of our current way of living.
In more than three years of constant correspondence with various politicians, and the Department of Housing itself, I have not been able to access a coherent response to my own current situation and history as I approach retirement with increasing insecurity, draining my savings, to pay unsustainable rents and facing poorer options in every aspect of living while speculative housing and wealth-creation mushroom around me and eat up my environment.
It is transparent that thinking and policies in this area have been bankrupt and are increasingly socially indifferent since the Celtic Tiger and the crash of 2008.
Nothing has been learned or appears likely to change in current policies, which are equivocal and retrogressive.
Worsening deprivation is becoming normalised, as the article outlines.
The extensive underlying social havoc, the multiplying distresses caused across our current communities are being ignored.
This normalised failure of Government is not acceptable, and it is a betrayal of most of the early founding principles of our State.
Our lakes are dying and 20% of species on this island are threatened with extinction. With a biodiversity crisis in full swing, you’d think the Government would be at least sending out the right signals about saving what’s left of our vanishing wildlife and ecosystems.
Sadly, politicians tend to be slow off the mark when it comes to protecting critters that can’t vote, and even slower when well-connected humans are lobbying them not to act on behalf of certain species.
This month, the Government will likely yield to the blood sport fraternity and issue the annual hare capture licence. If granted, the licences will permit coursing clubs to capture thousands of hares for the five-month hare-chasing season that begins in the last week of September.
The hares will be held in captivity for weeks, prior to having dogs set on them at venues nationwide.
The Irish hare, according to carbon dating of cave fossils, has been a feature of our landscape for more than 30,000 years. It survived the last Ice Age of 10,000 years ago, unlike a host of other species that are lost to us.
It was here for eons before humans, let alone politicians, stalked the land. It has unique genetic characteristics not found in any other hare species outside Ireland.
That our politicians still see fit give the green light to the persecution of a treasured mammal is scandalous, but to allow the wholesale capture of a species that has been in decline for the past half century, and in the middle of a biodiversity crisis, ought to be unconscionable.
Modern farming has sheared away much of the hare’s habitat, and rampant urbanisation eats into its humble abode. Can those in power not, for once, do what is right for nature and wildlife, instead of what’s politically expedient?
People need to contact their TDs if they disapprove of this annual assault on our hare population. The hare has enough to contend with, just struggling to exist in an increasingly hostile environment, without the stress of captivity, the terror of contrived chases.
The people who issue the netting licences should look into their hearts and ask themselves: Do we really want to sanction another round of this practice that makes life hell on earth for one of our few truly native mammals?
At the stroke of a pen, our leaders could end the plight of a creature that survived an Ice Age … only to find itself at the butt end of this joke that calls itself a “sport”.
The UN’s third report assessing the state of the world’s oceans records that sea levels are rising at twice the speed they were just a decade ago.
This is not unexpected yet I am unaware of any official conversation around the inevitability, and increasing urgency, of building tidal barriers for our cities.
How, on a small, wealthy Atlantic island, can this be?
And when the penny finally drops, will it, like the children’s hospital, take almost three decades to deliver?
It might be time to buy that little boat.
On May 28, 2026 defence minister Helen McEntee made a statement in Dáil Éireann, in relation to the UN Security Council’s failure to renew the UN mandate for Operation Irini.
The minister implied that the existence of the triple lock forced the cancellation of Irish Defence Forces personnel in Operation Irini, established to implement the UN arms embargo on Libya. Their tasks did not include rescuing drowning migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
The Irish naval service had been involved in two genuine humanitarian missions — Operations Pontus and Sophia — that helped rescue over 15,000 drowning migrants.
Pontus and Sophia were cancelled and replaced by Irini, which helped to push back fleeing migrants into Libya where many were tortured and exploited.
Sally Hayden’s book, , exposes the human costs resulting from this. Ireland should never have been involved in Operation Irini.
This mission was not a peace or a humanitarian one.
It referred to the Libyan Civil War while ignoring the fact that the EU/Nato attacks on Libya in 2011 helped to overthrow the Libyan government, causing huge amounts of Libyan army weapons to fall into the hands of militias and Isis that are still causing havoc in Libya and Sub-Saharan Africa.
On April 7, 2026, the UN International Organization for Migration reported that at least 990 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year.
That number will have increased by several hundred in the meantime.
The EU, including Ireland, has been failing in their duties under international maritime laws, yet the Irish Government is citing Irini as one of the reasons for abandoning the triple lock.
Since Irini began in 2020, an estimated 15,000 migrants have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean.
If the State does not have solicitors in its corner, the criminal justice system will collapse. It is that simple.
The district court is like the A&E of our criminal justice system. It is where the most vulnerable end up when their future knows it has run out of road.
I am deeply concerned that our district courts are becoming the discount stores for justice.
The proposed flat fee for solicitors will not fatten lawyers. It will cheapen efforts to effect proper justice.
Justice is not a commodity that can be minimised to save costs without severe consequences for fairness, equality, society, and the rule of law.
Inexplicably, the outstanding 8% of Fempi-era cuts [made during the recession] remains in place. We can’t cheapen justice any more. The blindfolds must be lifted.
