One island, two homelessness crises: what Belfast and Dublin aren't learning from each other

Two governments, one land border, and two homelessness crises that keep getting worse in almost exactly the same direction - yet Belfast and Dublin still talk about the problem as if the other side of the border doesn't exist. 

Start with the numbers, because they're stark enough to need no embellishment. In the Republic, 17,517 people were living in emergency accommodation at the end of March, a rise of 209 on the month before and roughly 14% higher than a year earlier. Of those, 5,571 were children - a figure that has climbed steadily for years, with child homelessness up close to a fifth over the past twelve months alone. North of the border, almost 5,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, a 65% increase since January 2021, according to the Housing Executive's own figures. Households in temporary accommodation across Northern Ireland are up 79% over the same five-year period. Neither government is close to turning this around, and neither seems to be looking very hard at what the other is doing. 

I believe this may be a missed opportunity – the two governments are structurally trying to solve the same problem, so why not cooperate and achieve reciprocal success?

The issue, to the greatest degree, is a funding problem. Homelessness services have felt the brunt of Stormont spending much of the past two years operating without a multi-year budget settlement. This problem is emphasised by Nicola McCrudden, Homeless Connect’s chief executive, who states “the homelessness organisations are unable to plan, hire, or build the kind of preventative services that actually stop people from becoming homeless in the first place”. The Housing Executive has, in fairness, found one genuine operational win inside that constraint - a 446% increase in the use of managed leased properties, which has meaningfully cut the number of families placed in hospitality. But a leasing scheme is a way of managing homelessness more humanely once it has already happened. It isn't prevention, and prevention is exactly what a funding-starved system struggles to invest in. 

The Republic's crisis, by contrast, is playing out against a government that has been willing to legislate directly on the private rental market — and is still losing ground. New rules that took effect on 1 March require landlords to offer six-year tenancies to any new tenant, an attempt to give renters the kind of long-term security that short lets have stripped away for a decade. It's a genuinely structural intervention, the sort of tenancy protection Northern Ireland doesn't have. But landlords have pushed back hard, with property-owner groups warning the rules are pushing some out of the rental market altogether -  and the homelessness figures published since the rule change suggest any benefit hasn't caught up with the underlying pressure yet. Dublin is still very much at the epicentre with two in three people in emergency accommodation nationally being in the capital alone.

Here is where a genuinely cross-border reading gets interesting rather than just grim. Northern Ireland's leased-property model (flawed and underfunded as it is) is still a more coherent placement strategy than the Republic's continued reliance on commercial hotels, and it's worth the Republic's Department of Housing actually studying it, budget constraints notwithstanding. Conversely, the Republic's willingness to legislate directly on tenancy length is exactly the kind of structural protection Stormont has never seriously attempted, and it's hard to see Northern Ireland's temporary-accommodation numbers coming down while renters north of the border have so much less security than their counterparts south of it. Two governments, solving half a problem each, largely without reference to one another. 

None of this is solved by better placement schemes or better tenancy law alone, on either side of the border - the deeper issue in both jurisdictions is that neither is building enough homes and neither has been for years. But the day-to-day question of what happens to someone the moment they become homeless is a policy choice, not an inevitability, and it's one both governments are currently answering badly and separately. 

I've spent the past year working on a much smaller piece of this same puzzle - a police diversion scheme for first-time rough sleepers, built on the idea that the first response to someone without a home should be a referral to support, not enforcement. It's a local proposal, not a national one, and it doesn't touch the Republic or Stormont's budget crisis in any direct way. But it rests on the same principle that a housing crisis is ultimately made worse or better by how each system chooses to meet someone at their first point of contact. Belfast and Dublin have very different tools available to them. Neither has yet shown much interest in borrowing the others. 

Written by Alexander Weilds, a student at Shrewsbury School.