AFTER ONLY FIVE months in the job, Minister for Housing James Browne is probably not yet as synonymous with Ireland’s unending housing and homelessness crisis as some of his predecessors. 

Browne is the fourth minister to hold the office since Simon Coveney promised in 2017 to end the phenomenon of families living in emergency accommodation hostels, and he is beginning to make his mark on the crisis.

Not by solving it or anything, mind you. Silly of you to suggest such a thing. No, after child homelessness was confirmed to have reached yet another record high last week, the new boy took his first steps towards etching his face onto this particularly ignominious Mount Rushmore. He’s putting up major numbers in his first season — 4,844 children accessed homeless services in May, according to the latest figures. He’s still a ways off GOAT status, but he’s certainly heading for Rookie of the Year. And if the words out of his mouth are to be believed, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

“The sense of direction, unfortunately, has been growing upwards,” Browne told The Journal on his way into a Cabinet meeting during the week, when asked about this dire state of affairs. In case this rather roundabout way of speaking is unfamiliar to you, this is how people sound when they know they have absolutely nothing reasonable, worthwhile or helpful to say. Sure we all want children to be housed, if only it weren’t for that damn sense of direction growing so inexorably upwards. Personally, I liked him better back when he would say things like: “I feel good, I knew that I would” and “Owww!”. More hopeful. 

Asked about the prospect of Ireland passing the threshold of 5,000 children accessing homelessness services in a month, Browne said: “We’re very close to that 5,000. I don’t want to see that threshold crossed, but it’s going to be very difficult to prevent crossing over that 5,000, considering how close we are”.  In unrelated news, Browne’s cabinet colleague Paschal Donohoe confirmed on Thursday that Ireland’s exchequer recorded a surplus of €4.5 billion for the first half of the year. 

So let’s review. On the one hand, we have 4,844 children and over 10,000 more adults accessing homelessness services. On the other hand, we have €4,500,000,000. Now, this is a puzzle. A quandary for the ages. I’m racking my brain here and I just— Can we take the money and—? Can we use a small fraction of those billions—? No, I just don’t see any way around it. We’re going to have to accept that child homelessness is preordained by destiny itself to hit 5,000 and continue to climb. Things can be difficult to prevent when a government wakes up every day for nearly a decade and actively decides not to prevent them. 

Spare us the ‘sense of direction’. Something is either moving in a certain direction or it’s not, and when it comes to homelessness in Ireland, that direction has been irrefutably clear for nearly nine years. Homelessness is increasing, and the reason it’s increasing is because not enough is being done to prevent it, not because there is some kind of Adam Smith-esque invisible hand that guides people out of their homes and into emergency accommodation. It’s not that the public is experiencing some kind of delusional sense-perception that homelessness continues to rise under Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. That’s a thing that is actually, definitively, demonstrably happening — day after day, month after month, year after year. 

The reality is that Browne’s comments, nonsensical though they may seem to ordinary people, are carefully chosen to remove as much agency as possible from the most agentic players in Irish housing. There is virtually no other person in Ireland who has as much power to look at the homelessness crisis dead-on and take the kind of action one might take when one actually believes their own talk about an emergency. Unfortunately, Browne appears to be — at best — resigned to the crisis. A slave to the sense of direction. 

It had already been a big week for the power of words. In the wake of various chants made at the Glastonbury Music Festival leading to a criminal investigation of Kneecap and British punk duo Bob Vylan, the BBC announced that it will no longer facilitate ‘high-risk’ broadcasts from the festival. 

Of course, the BBC had already declined to broadcast Kneecap’s performance this year, a course of action which was endorsed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself. It is staggering that Starmer and the BBC would be so historically and culturally illiterate as to misunderstand that trying to suppress the free expression of artists pretty much unfailingly has the opposite effect, but hey, we’re all pretty accustomed to being staggered by this point.

Everyone ended up watching Kneecap’s set anyway, thanks to it being broadcast live on TikTok by a Welsh woman named Helen Wilson. Not only that, but other performers — most notably Bob Vylan — made it impossible for anyone watching at home to avoid contemplating either Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or the facilitative role played by many western governments, including Starmer’s.

Bob Vylan are now under police investigation for their performance, as are Kneecap (whose member Mo Chara is already currently charged with terrorism offences in relation to an earlier stage performance). The inevitable effect of these redoubled efforts to put manners on the likes of Kneecap is entirely predictable, and, at this point, it’s almost as though these institutions are going out of their way to make Kneecap one of the best-known acts on the planet. Immediately after their Glasto set, it was announced that Kneecap had been added to Electric Picnic as a headliner. 

Still, it’s important to remember that the world is not always as predictable as we might think. To hold in our hearts that things can change for the better in ways we might never have imagined. In ways we thought impossible. This week, for example, and you’re really not going to believe this, budget airline Ryanair announced that it would be increasing — yes, increasing — the size of its free “personal” baggage allowance from 40x25x20cm to… 40x30x20cm.

Do not scratch your eyes. Ryanair, the airline whose website tries to trick you into buying insurance and whose boss has often teased the public with gougey prospects like paying to use the plane restroom, is letting us bring more stuff on the plane. For free. If you’re reading this waiting and waiting for the other foot to drop or for a grand piano played by Micheal O’Leary to come crashing down on your head, I’m sure you are not alone. 

The change will allow for personal bags that contain 24 litres as opposed to 20 litres, a relatively substantial increase, and not the kind of concession you’d have ever thought Ryanair would make unless you agreed to hand over your firstborn child or at least buy some of those scratchcards that they sell. 

Every now and then, things can actually go against what one might call ‘the sense of direction’. Somebody tell the Minister for Housing.