By vividly bringing to life the “bystander effect” and its attendant social forces, Keegan avoids these binaries of past and present and encourages us to ask whether we would say anything or, instead, turn a blind eye to pervasive institutionalisation in our own time.

A certain sector of the Irish population seems to strongly dislike David McWilliams. He is often the butt of jokes where something mean appears to have replaced something witty in the punchline. He’s like our answer to Malcolm Gladwell, someone with a prominent platform that seeks to make complicated things simple, even if that runs… Read more »

This week the housing charity Threshold published its 2022 annual report. I was struck, reading it, that the numbers involved in their work were terrifyingly large. Over 50,000 people needed to reach out to the charity in an effort to avoid homelessness. It was a stark reminder of how the homelessness crisis that Ireland has… Read more »

Maybe the reason the Kenny Report is sitting on a shelf gathering dust is that governments do not want to reduce the cost of housing.  Their core voters are home owners who will be horrified at the thought that the value of their house would be reduced, even minimally. But unless they are planning to sell the house, that is a purely paper reduction.

The reasons for turning down one or more offers of social housing are the concern of the homeless person or family involved, and this is not why the homelessness situation is “complicated”. It is complicated because of the reticence to solve it, by automatically placing homeless people in [actual] social homes for fear of a cascade effect where there is a rush of people declaring themselves homeless. This is the anxiety expressed in the 2017 Welfare cheats… campaign – the unfounded fear that the people at the bottom of society are taking advantage of us all, when our real fear is that we might some day be those people

If land that has been identified for the RZLT was instead purchased by local authorities using the CPO mechanism and used to build public housing, it would be a step in the right direction.

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.

It has been difficult to remain unmoved by the many images of homelessness and poverty which have confronted us in the past weeks and months. A young boy kneels to eat a warm meal provided by a soup kitchen. Using a piece of cardboard, probably provided by a parent, he is trying to prevent the… Read more »

In our general election guide to the economy, our Social Theologian, Kevin Hargaden says we should ask ourselves who the economy serves, and how it is affecting our lives and the life of the planet.