Tiglin founder backs bishops: homelessness ‘a failure of policy’

Senator says crisis is driven by doors that ‘should have stayed open’

The co-founder of one of Ireland’s best known homeless charities, Tiglin, has backed the bishops’ verdict that Ireland’s homelessness crisis is “a failure of Government and public policies at all levels”.

Senator Aubrey McCarthy, who has worked with homeless people for almost 20 years, told The Irish Catholic that his experience at Tiglin bore out the bishops’ warning that “just reacting to a crisis is both costly and ineffective”.

“I have seen that close up for almost 20 years through my work with Tiglin,” he said.

The bishops’ warning came in a report by the Bishops’ Commission for Social Issues and International Affairs, presented at their autumn general meeting in Maynooth last week. The report described the crisis as “a blight” on society and called for its root causes to be tackled.

It noted a 111% rise in the number of people accessing emergency accommodation between the launch of the Housing for All plan in 2021 and August 2026, and a 169% rise over the past decade.

Tiglin’s Lighthouse Café on Pearse Street, run with Dublin Christian Mission, provides hot meals, clothing and a doctor to between 200 and 500 people a day.

“I have always believed that most of the people who come through our door didn’t have to end up there,” Senator McCarthy said. “Somewhere along the way a door was closed that should have stayed open: a tenancy, a hospital discharge, a prison release, a young person leaving care.”

He said the official figures understate the problem because they leave out “people couch-surfing, sleeping rough, in domestic violence refuges, or in direct provision with a right to remain but no housing… So it is a failure of policy, and as a member of the Oireachtas Housing Committee I accept my share of the responsibility for fixing it.”

He said he raised the alarm a decade ago. “I spoke at the Oireachtas housing committee in 2016 and warned that we are facing a crisis,” he said. “The minister at the time was Simon Coveney and the homeless figures were 6000. He promised on record that homelessness would be reduced by 2020. Well, the numbers keep climbing.”

To end homelessness, he said, the State must “build a pipeline of public housing that doesn’t stop and start with every budget”.