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Twenty years ago next June, I sat my Leaving Cert and the September that followed I sat on Grafton Street, alone (as my sister was on a J1 in the US), with the Evening Herald in my lap looking for somewhere to live for the college year ahead. My mother’s advice was: “Stick with Ranelagh, Rathmines and Rathgar and at least you can walk up to UCD if you are stuck for money.”
I was fortunate enough to find a place in Ranelagh, the shortest walk. Now I say ‘fortunate’, as finding accommodation for students even 20 years ago was not the easiest and the bedsits we lived in during that first year with their metered electricity and shared bathrooms have since been unceremoniously shut down for a number of very good reasons. After that we moved every year, different rooms and different housemates, but always the same effort to find somewhere that was affordable and liveable.
I lived in Dublin for six years between college and work and although I have worked in Dublin for the best part of 13 years, I am a commuter. This is partly choice, in that buying a house in Dublin was always going to see me struggle with a mortgage on a house I wasn’t happy to be living in due to me being a country girl at heart, and because, ultimately, I have a tie with home.
Two major protests were held last month in Dublin to call on the Government to take more action against the homeless crisis. According to Focus Ireland, in the last three years the number of families becoming homeless has increased demonstrably – with 1,728 families accessing emergency accommodation in November of this year. These families had 3,811 children. I don’t like to imagine my girls asking me ‘how will Santa find us?’ which is a question I am sure many of the parents in emergency accommodation will have been asked this Christmas.
The causes of homelessness are exceptionally complex, with contributing structural factors including the lack of affordable housing, unemployment and poverty and/or personal issues such as addictions, mental health issues and family breakdown. Although in truth there are mixed reactions to the causes of the crisis, it appears that the current rise in family homelessness is driven primarily by economic factors. It is literally too expensive for people to live where they have support or can find work.
Homelessness is not just the people you see sleeping on the streets in Dublin, it is in our rural towns and villages. It is the students whose education is impacted by long commutes to college every day and it is the young couples with children forced to live with their parents for extended periods of time because they can’t afford to rent their own home.
This certainly makes me appreciate that even with all this movement between various houses and homes over the last 20 years, there was also always the comfort of home if I needed it. There was never any doubt that at Christmas we would go home and mother would feed us and the place would be warm and you would be welcome.
Twenty families received an early Christmas present of a new home the week before Christmas as a new social housing development was officially opened in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow. A lot more are needed by Christmas 2019.
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