STRESS – THAT’S WHAT you feel all day, every day when you’re facing eviction and the prospect of going into emergency accommodation. I’m one of many tenants challenging a mass eviction from Tathony House, an apartment block in Dublin 8.

Fury – that’s what I felt when I heard Taoiseach Leo Varadkar try to gaslight victims of the housing crisis.

He said people in emergency accommodation “refuse multiple offers to go on social housing” – creating the impression that his government have been offering homes to people but families would rather stay in homelessness.

Let’s take our situation in Tathony House as an example. We got one email back from the housing minister, Darragh O’Brien’s office, that simply said to the tenants that the government were introducing a new scheme to allow tenants “right of first refusal” to buy their homes.

Everyone in Tathony House is renting precisely because we can’t afford to buy and the cost of purchasing an entire block of 34 flats would be €6 million or more. If we had that money we wouldn’t be facing imminent homelessness.

And the government can’t even get that silly scheme up and running – even if tenants could buy, the government is still arguing about forcing tenants to have to bid against other buyers. Meanwhile, families are being thrown into stretched and strained homeless services.

Blame the victim

Varadkar’s comments just don’t add up. There were 12,411 people in emergency accommodation in May this year. When the Taoiseach was questioned on his insinuation that those families were there because of refusals he clarified:

The situation is that, in the past two years, about 5,000 people on the housing list have turned down an offer of social housing, and they had the right to do so.

Being on the housing list is not the same thing as being in emergency accommodation and he knows this. The 2022 housing list shows 57,842 households on the list as of November 2022. But there are also people on the HAP payment who are on the social housing transfer list.

There were 58,048 on the HAP payment by the end of 2022 and every one of them had to first go on the housing list to qualify. The Government said that the social housing waiting lists fell by over 36.8% in six years – by hiding numbers on the HAP lists.

Out of nearly 120,000 on both lists, 5,000 refused an offer from the council. When you make people wait over a decade for a home and then you offer something unsuitable for their family, their children, their work – of course, they’re going to ask for a place they can actually feel comfortable in, they’ve gone through years of stress to get it.

And while there is an overlap between the social housing lists and people in emergency accommodation, it’s just plain wrong to insinuate the 5,000 refusals came from people who are homeless or that that’s the reason people are homeless.

Supply, supply, supply

The Simon Community list the reasons for homelessness ranking the most important driver as being the “structural” – that is the lack of building of public housing which has led to an overreliance on private landlords.

It’s that context that made the lifting of the eviction ban such a callous move by the government. They used to call it “Thatcherism” but in economic textbooks, they call it “neo-liberalism” – but it’s the prevailing economic mantra of our times.

Neo-liberalism says: you run down public housing and you assist the private market.

I’ve seen first-hand the effects of neo-liberal housing policy in action. I grew up in Fatima Mansions flats in Dublin’s South West inner city – then one of the most deprived parts of the country.

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The flat complexes were turned into ghettos under successive government policies which scared workers away from the idea of public housing. Our communities were destroyed while the supply of public housing disappeared. The social housing threshold was lowered to make it only available to people on welfare or poverty wages – creating pools of poverty, trauma and crime.

The stress I went through as a kid and the sleepless nights I’m facing here in Tathony House are being driven by the same economic model. Varadkar’s game is to distract from government responsibility for consciously made policy decisions.

The Taoiseach and his colleagues are playing to the gallery. Varadkar knows he doesn’t get any votes in working-class areas and wants to shore up a right-wing voter base by pandering to common prejudices about poor people and those who end up homeless. He famously said he represented the “people who get up early!” Yet the Tathony House mass eviction and the housing crisis as a whole show that’s just not true. Homelessness is affecting people from all sectors of society now.

I work as a community worker, I work on a phone line helping people with social welfare issues. I have always paid my rent – even texting my landlord to let him know the rent is due and I’ve paid it.

The same is true of all the other tenants in our block. They are chefs, security workers and retail workers. Wealthy landlords want tenants like us out so they can make millions. But landlords are like sharks – they’ll always do what’s best to make more cash. It’s up to the government to curtail the sharks. But neo-liberalism is all about feeding them and as long as we live under a neo-liberal state ordinary workers will just be shark bait.

James O’Toole is a community worker, musician, author, video maker and resident of Tathony House. He is also a member of People Before Profit.