The State is happier when it’s spending money to keep people in bad circumstances than it is when it’s spending to make their lives better. This is not some playful paradox. It’s the reason we have a housing crisis.

In 1990, local authorities in Ireland spent the equivalent of €600 on emergency bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless people. That’s not €600 a night or €600 a week. It’s for the whole year. It covered the cost of putting up all the families who would otherwise be on the street. The number of such families was five.

This was at the end of a pretty dire decade of the Irish economy. But then a funny thing happened. As the economy improved through the 1990s, and the Celtic Tiger began to stalk the land, we added four zeros to the amount of money spent on emergency B&Bs for homeless families, turning €600 into €6 million. The number of families needing this dire intervention went from five in 1990 to 1,202 in 1999.

The richer we got, the more homelessness rose. The explanation was obvious enough. In the late 1980s, the State embarked on austerity programmes that were highly praised by right-thinking people at home and abroad. One of the cost-cutting measures was a drastic reduction in the provision of social housing. Local authority housing output fell by two-thirds in the late 1980s. Combined with the selling off of existing social houses, this meant that the available stock of public housing fell by 15 per cent between 1988 and 1996.

[ Ireland is spending big on housing. So why is the sector........

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