The topic of private housing is given extensive and glowing coverage in the colour supplements of Irish newspapers, while the social housing sector is considered a dreary, detail-heavy question of policy. But three books about housing in Ireland which were published last year have revealed social housing to be a topic of fierce contestation.

  Two years ago,  on the centenary of the Spanish flu pandemic, Kevin Hargaden wrote about the need to address structural injustices  in society and in our health system to prepare for the next global pandemic, and reminded us that Christians have always tended to the sick and marginalised.

  In many ways, the book of Exodus is the cornerstone of the bible. The story of liberation from slavery and the idea that God identifies with the oppressed is the bass-line for Jesus’ ministry. But there was always one part of the narrative that I struggled with, says Kevin Hargaden.

  Last Autumn, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice published an issue of Working Notes built around the theme of “risk”. Those essays have continued relevance, but none of them mention pandemics. This is not an oversight on our part. We understood risk as a compound concept. It isn’t simply a function of unexpected… Read more »

  We are currently living through two global emergencies. Covid-19, an acute onset crisis, and the climate and biodiversity emergency, which is chronic. Both of these are urgent and require an immediate response.

  Keith Adams, JCFJ Social Policy Advocate, has sent a policy briefing document to Minister Charlie Flanagan and the Department of Justice and Equality (DJE) which puts forward three proposals for how the prison population can be reduced to mitigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice strongly believes… Read more »

  Our current market-focused political culture came to power after the oil crises of the 1970s. In normal circumstances, it would be highly unlikely that any electorate would vote for a system that systematically weakened social welfare, deregulated markets, and reorganised resources so that rich people were more likely to get richer. But the architects… Read more »

Ireland has been awarded €12 million by the EU for the LIFE-IP PAF Wild Atlantic Nature project that will focus on the protection and restoration of its blanket bogs in the western and northern parts of the country. While this news suggests the prospect of healthy, better-functioning bogs, what does it actually mean for these… Read more »

One can only imagine that Minister for Housing, Eoghan Murphy, breathed a sigh of relief. In the midst of a difficult General Election campaign, his Department was able to publish homelessness figures for December, which for the first time in a year, saw a reduction.

Housing has remained firmly on the agenda throughout the General Election 2020 campaign. Previously, the JCFJ proposed three questions about housing which could be used in conversations with canvassers, to see what each party’s housing policy is, beyond slogans. To close this loop, answers about housing policy were also taken from their current manifestos.