Government policy making homeless crisis worse, opposition says

Opposition TDs have said that the government’s housing policies are only making the homeless crisis worse, despite a slight drop in the most recent wave of homeless figures.

The most recent round of statistics, released on the afternoon of January 30, revealed that 16,734 people availed of homeless services in Ireland in the final week of December 2025.

While the figure may have dropped month-on-month, the overall figures are still higher than the figure from this time last year, when 14,864 people were availing of homeless services.

Drops in homeless figures are usually recorded over the Christmas period, meaning that an increase in the January stats is almost assured.

Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin noted, “compared to December 2024, homelessness is up 13%, child homelessness is up 15%, and family homelessness is up 18%.”

The Dublin Mid-West TD placed the rise in homeless figures squarely at the government’s feet, noting that Minister for Housing James Browne’s measures to cut funding for tenant-in-situ schemes have only exacerbated the problem.

“Many families, including those depending on HAP or working on modest to low wages, will not be able to afford these new rents. The consequence will be even more adults and children forced into homelessness by the government in 2026,” Ó Broin warned.

He said that the government’s new rent legislation will effectively end the “modest protection” provided to renters through the Rent Pressure Zones. 

“This will mean that from March, renters in new tenancies will be hit with even higher rents,” he explained, and said that in turn, it could drive homeless figures even higher.

Ó Broin’s counterpart in the Social Democrats, Northside TD Rory Hearne, said “the cause of this crisis, which continues to spiral out of control, is government failure to treat this situation with the urgency and gravity it demands.”

The Dublin North-West TD said the homeless crisis is “a defining disaster for this generation.”

Hearne noted that by the Department’s own admission, the main cause of homelessness is evictions from private rental sector landlords and family breakdown, the latter of which is often perpetuated by overcrowding in substandard accommodation.

“Right now, we’re seeing record levels of eviction right across the country – there were 15,000 evictions in the first nine months of last year alone.”

Hearne noted, “rather than addressing this trend, the government is introducing disastrous rental measures which will allow landlords to increase rents between tenancies – in the run-up to the introduction of this backwards step, we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of evictions.”

The temporary introduction of no-fault evictions saw a pronounced drop in homeless figures, with the figure dipping below 12,000; the lifting of the ban in March 2023, in controversial circumstances, directly coincided with a rise in homeless figures since then.

When the 32nd Dáil sat in May 2016 to re-elect Enda Kenny as Taoiseach in the aftermath of the 2016 general election, the Central Statistics Office noted that 6906 people were in homeless accommodation on the night of the Census in April 2016.

That figure has since increased by 141%.