The October 2025 homelessness figures land like a brick through the window of Ireland’s so-called social conscience. Sixteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-six human beings, living, breathing, thinking citizens and children, boxed into “emergency accommodation” that resembles a stopgap solution only if you squint hard enough and ignore the smell of systemic failure rising from the numbers. Eleven and a half thousand adults, over five thousand children, a whole small town’s worth of kids growing up in hotels and hostels, and the government has the gall to present this as a monthly report instead of a national indictment.
In a normal society, these numbers would be a siren from the watchtower. But in Ireland’s mad bureaucracy, they're just another spreadsheet cell. Every statistic in this report reads like a casualty figure from a war that shouldn’t exist, a war waged quietly, efficiently, against the poor. Families make up a quarter of the homeless households, and single adults nearly three-quarters. That’s not just a housing crisis; that’s a generational collapse. Almost six thousand children under eighteen caught in the gears of a system built to grind the vulnerable into administrative dust.
You can practically hear the bureaucrats patting themselves on the back as they churn out percentages about gender and age distributions, as if the tragedy becomes easier to swallow once you convert it into pie charts and percentages. Nearly 60% of adults are men, sure, that tracks, men always get hit first and worst when the floor collapses, but the real horror is in the age bands. Over half the homeless adults are between 25 and 44, prime working and living years, the years society claims it rewards. A quarter more are middle-aged, staring down the barrel of a future that’s shrinking by the day. Two hundred and sixty-seven people over 65, elderly people, shoved into emergency accommodation like some kind of grim retirement plan for a country that forgot how to care.
And Dublin, the gleaming jewel of Irish capitalism, hoards more than 70% of all homeless adults, like some monstrous magnet for misery. Eight thousand one hundred and forty-one adults, enough to fill a small stadium, shuffled between PEA, STA, TEA, and other alphabet soup euphemisms for “we don’t have real housing, so here’s a stopgap.” The fact that the majority of accommodation is still Private Emergency Accommodation, hotels and B&Bs, is a quiet confession that private profit has long since eaten the state alive. There’s no “emergency” when the same conditions repeat every month for a decade; that’s policy.
The report’s self-congratulation about “preventions” and “exits to secure tenancies” reads like something cooked up by a PR team rather than public servants. One thousand six hundred prevented from entering homelessness and 1,234 moved out sounds impressive until you view it through the proper social lens: these are crumbs dropped from the banquet table of a housing system engineered to fail. Tenancies created through Housing First barely hit double digits in multiple regions. Meanwhile, thousands more fall in the front door of emergency accommodation every quarter. You don’t need chemicals to see the hallucination here, it’s all right there in the numbers: the exits are dwarfed by the scale of the problem.
The citizenship breakdown adds another layer of quiet cruelty. Half Irish, half non-Irish, a reflection that capitalism’s failures don’t discriminate, but its apologists will. You can almost predict the cynical debates this will fuel, the narratives that whisper the problem away by blaming migrants instead of the decades-long political decision to outsource the housing system to developers, landlords, and “the market,” as though the market ever cared whether a child sleeps in a bed or on a floor.
Let's call it what it is: state-sanctioned neglect dressed up as progress, a bureaucratic fever dream where human beings become inputs and outputs, and the state issues monthly newsletters instead of solutions. A social analysis doesn’t have to look far, the very structure of the report betrays the ideology behind it. Everything measured, nothing solved. Everything counted, nothing changed.
This isn’t a homelessness report. It’s a confession note slipped under the public’s door. A society that tolerates nearly 17,000 people in emergency accommodation, including more than 5,000 children, is not malfunctioning. It is functioning exactly as designed: protecting property over people, private interest over public need, profit over humanity. And until that design is smashed, these monthly reports will read less like statistics and more like obituaries for the social contract.
⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.
