PADDY O’GORMAN: Why homelessness and housing are two different problems

I once saw Pat Kenny of RTÉ break up a brawl between two homeless, drunken men. The year was 1995. At that time, Kenny was presenting a Saturday evening television show called Kenny Live (he had yet to get the Late Late Show gig). Journalist John Drennan, then of the Sunday Independent, had written a book in the form of a fictionalised diary of a man on the dole. Drennan was a guest on Kenny Live and there was a panel discussion in which various lobby groups for jobless and homeless people responded to some of the issues raised in Drennan’s book. Richard Bruton TD, who was a Minister with an economic portfolio in the government at the time, was also on the panel. I was there as part of an invited studio audience.

Also in that invited audience were two homeless men, in their forties, along with their Focus Ireland minders. When it came to their turn to speak, the men explained why they were homeless. It was the fault of the system, the society, the government, the media, the Gardaí. One of the men, a Northerner, spoke darkly of how “establishment censorship” was preventing voices such as his from being heard. We all listened politely.

Then, when the television programme was over, Pat Kenny and his team invited us all into a hospitality room. There was drinks, including alcoholic drinks. As much drinks as anyone wanted. There was animated conversation. I think about twenty minutes had passed and I was chatting with Richard Bruton when the table of drinks in the middle of the room was turned over and smashed to the ground in an explosion of broken glass. The two homeless men had fallen across the table and onto the floor, punching each other viciously to the head.

Pat Kenny jumped in and wrenched the men apart, a man on each arm. “Men, stop this!”, said Pat. “For me. I’m asking you to stop!” The rest of us in the room looked on, shocked into silence. Pat’s intervention worked. The men’s faces, at first contorted in drunken rage, gradually changed as Pat Kenny’s words sank in and it dawned on the men that they were acting disgracefully. The Focus Ireland people escorted the two men away. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

I still think of that fight every time I hear simplistic pronouncements made on how we can solve homelessness. Those two men had been offered hospitality and they abused it. Their brawl and drunken behaviour was infinitely more enlightening as to the reason for their homelessness than all of the Focus Ireland-approved words they had spoken earlier that evening while on national television.

Those two men were people who I would call chronically homeless , that is, people who will be always prone to end up on the streets, no matter how much accommodation might be available.

Homeless campaigners tell us that there’s 160,000 vacant premises (or some figure like that) in Ireland. So there’s room for everyone and unlimited numbers of immigrants too. The implication seems to be that these vacant premises should just be opened up and people let in to live in them. So how would this work? Will people be expected to pay rent? Or can they just stay for free? And if the latter, why should anyone bother paying for where they live? I’m sure there’s many working couples who are paying a mortgage in far suburbia and commuting daily to say, Dublin City Centre to work, who would dearly love a free city centre apartment but no, there will be nothing free for them. Rent-free living, it seems, is something that is only to be made available for homeless people who don’t work.

In December of 2016 a group of homeless campaigners and artists occupied Apollo House, an empty office block in Dublin City Centre, and opened it up for homeless people. There was enormous public support for this move. People contributed money and food and clothing and blankets and volunteered their time to help. Embedded, approved journalists wrote from inside Apollo House about what great things were being achieved through the occupation and how well things were going for the homeless people staying therein. The occupation organisers asked that all other journalists should respect the privacy of the homeless people living there and not attempt to speak to them, which is why, about three weeks into the occupation, I stood outside Apollo House early one morning to speak to homeless people who were living there.

It was obvious the Apollo House occupation was doomed. Apollo House was conveniently close to the methadone clinic at Pearse Street so I met plenty of people on their way there to get their morning supplies. It was good to have a place to stay, the addicts told me, although they were being kept awake at night by other addicts “goofing”. (Goofing means acting in an unruly, obnoxious way while intoxicated on drugs. I remember once being in the recreation area of the Merchant’s Quay drug project in Dublin and seeing a sign displayed, by order of management, which read “No Goofing”.)

I met a man in his forties from Crumlin in Dublin who told me he was homeless after he had left the British Army and returned to Ireland and was now not welcomed by any of his family. Was this because they were angry at him having joined a foreign army? No, he said, it was because he had “blackguarded” everyone who had ever tried to help him as he had only ever cared about getting himself more drink. He seemed a calm, gentlemanly person, I said to him. “You haven’t met me when I have a few drinks down my neck”, was his candid response.

A young man with a rural accent spoke manically about all the wrongs his mother had done him. He was rambling, incoherent and agitated and I had to try for quite a while to lose him. That was an interview that wouldn’t get broadcast.

People spoke to me of the fights and rows, the needles, the theft, the mentally ill people acting manically, and the blood, shit and vomit on the floor in Apollo House, all of which would be entirely typical of what you would expect to find in any homeless hostel, or any building occupied by homeless people, anywhere. In that sense, Apollo House was no different. But what was different was the absence of professional staff to deal with the challenges that providing accommodation for homeless people presents. Apollo House was staffed by sincere, well-meaning volunteers and also by insincere posers who were happy to sing their protest songs outside the building at the start of the occupation but who had no intention after that of seeing to the needs of the homeless people inside. After one month, a court order was got by the owners of Apollo House causing the occupation to end. That put the whole sorry project out of its misery. The posers were off the hook. Now they could walk away, blaming the ending of the occupation on the heartlessness of capitalism, which they did. Dublin City councillor Mannix Flynn had a different take on the occupation. He said: “I found it was deeply exploitative, and that the individuals in Apollo House purporting to represent the homeless were basically exploiting the homeless for their own capital.” I agree with Councillor Flynn.

So what can we do to alleviate homelessness? We increase the supply of accommodation. We build more homes and we remove obstacles to existing vacant properties being made available for rent or sale. All of this is obvious and there are many wise people who are trying to bring these necessary changes about. I have just a few suggestions of my own to add.

First, we should never have got rid of bedsits. (A bedsit is a flat for one person, typically one room that serves as kitchen, bedroom and living room but with bathroom facilities down the corridor shared with other renters in the building.) As a young person, I lived in both bedsits and shared, self-contained flats in the flatlands of Dublin and Cork cities. Bedsits are better. In a bedsit you had your privacy. In a flat shared with three or four other people you have no such privacy. You have to watch what your flatmates want to watch on the telly. You are always in your flatmates’ company. Sure, you don’t have to go down the corridor to the loo as you did when in a bedsit but you don’t have unrestricted access to the bathroom of a shared flat to yourself, either. If, God forbid, I should lose my home some day and need to return to rented accommodation, I hope I would be able to afford a self-contained flat for one person rather than be forced to share with strangers again. It might have been helpful to have still had the bedsit available as a more affordable option.

Next, shared living was a good idea and it should be revived. It was championed a few years back by the then Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy but was reviled by almost everyone else; first by opposition politicians and soon after by government politicians, too, who couldn’t wait to distance themselves from Murphy’s initiative. What was so bad about shared living? Think about it. As a single person, you would have the privacy of your own living room, bedroom and bathroom, so no loo queues to endure. And you would share a dining and food preparation area with the rest of the building if you wanted to cook. That makes the shared area a place to socialise. And a place for romances to begin. Say there is someone who catches your eye and you fancy her (for argument’s sake, please just be a straight man). You don’t have much disposable income as you are paying a lot on rent. Pubs are expensive, and restaurants more so. But in your shared living space, you have a chance to meet and maybe share a meal with this woman. And if the attraction between you both proves mutual, the suggestion of “your place or mine” is eminently realisable. That’s not an option when you’re sharing a flat with three other blokes.

And people are doing a lot of sharing. In my day, flats were cramped, often musty and mouse-infested (you would hear them scurrying around at night). Things seem to me to be no better now. What were once fine old houses are divided into perhaps eight flats, as you will see if you look at how many doorbells there are on houses in Dublin, say, on the Rathmines Road or the western end of the North Circular Road. Basement flats are the worst, in my experience. Mould forms on the wall. Speak to the people renting, mainly workers from South America and Eastern Europe, and you will find that they are sub-letting rooms or occupying beds in shifts. Even if you don’t get to visit these flats, you can get a good idea of just how cramped these places are by looking at the photographs on the property websites. A standard piece of furniture is a couch with a bunk bed over it, likely placed in the corner of a living/dining area. And bathrooms have been shoe-horned into spaces that they were never meant for, with toilets you would need to sit side-saddle on as there’s no room for your leg at the side that is up against the shower.

Shared living would have been a great improvement for people stuck in flats such as these. But I don’t think those housing protestors who opposed shared living ever really cared about the well-being of renters. A common complaint by the housing protestors was that the planned bedrooms in Murphy’s initiative would be no bigger that prison cells. So what? Do those protestors have any idea about the conditions that renters are living in now? I think it would be nice if all renters could have a detached four-bedroomed home with a garden and swimming pool. But that’s not going to happen. Shared living would have made a real improvement in the short-term for people who are now remain stuck in overcrowded, expensive, unhealthy living conditions.

So if we can make enough accommodation available for everyone, by whatever means, will that solve homelessness? No, it will not.

There are five reasons, in my experience, why people end up sleeping rough: drink, drugs, mental illness, gambling, and an unbearable home situation. And even that last reason is usually the result of one or more of the previous reasons on the part of the person who is making the home situation unbearable. Women flee domestic violence. Young people flee the home because of the behaviour of their mum’s new, live-in boyfriend.

Even if there were enough hostel space for everyone, some people will still sleep rough. Rough sleepers will often tell you that they cannot live in hostels because they find them to be too dangerous; there are psychotic people there who may be prone to random violence, or there are drug-dealers and other people in hostels to whom the rough-sleeper owes money. And time and again, when you speak to rough-sleepers, you will find there has been an underlying trauma in their lives since childhood. They were raised in care, or perhaps one or more parent died young through drugs or violence. Rough sleepers have rarely had a childhood with a stable, loving family; rather they have been cared for by the state, directly or indirectly, all their lives. Rough sleepers are people who have had a rotten start in life.

Dedicated professionals in our social services and charity sectors make great efforts to intervene to help chronically homeless people. Rent arrears are written off, allowing the person to start afresh. Decent, sometimes sheltered accommodation is found at an affordable rent. Addiction problems are addressed. Sometimes, people lives are turned around. Sometimes. But then what do you do when, six months after the fresh start has been made, you find that even the modest rent expected from the person is not being paid? And the dodgy boyfriend who led the person into trouble previously is back on the scene and is pleased to have found new, free accommodation to avail of? Soon the neighbours are complaining about anti-social behaviour occurring in the area because of the presence of the person who was placed there by the housing charity.

Everyone deserves a second chance and then maybe a third or more chances. But you can’t just keep bailing out people forever. Working people pay for their accommodation. Rent or mortgage is generally the first bill that working people plan for in the month and then set about budgeting with whatever they have left over. Chronically homeless people expect other people to pay for their accommodation.

Should people who don’t pay for their accommodation have the same right to housing as people who do?

No, they should not.