Cork musician Martin Leahy, who has been singing his own song about homelessness for 187 weeks outside Leinster House in Dublin, was invited in to address a housing committee this week.<\/p>\n
The singer\/songwriter addressed the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, where he appealed for something to be done to help the large number of homeless and hidden homeless people in the country.<\/p>\n
Mr Leahy said that every week, on a Thursday, he travels to Dublin and stands outside the gates of the D\u00e1il to sing his song \u2018Everyone Should Have A Home\u2019, and that this was his 187th week protesting about the housing crisis.<\/p>\n
He explained that he had personal experience of the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2022, I received word that my landlord was planning on selling the property I was living in and I was going to be evicted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though I lived in a rural part of West Cork, I quickly realised that I could not afford the rent of the very few properties that were available.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI have always rented and have always been able to pay my rent. This was the first time in my life that I could not do it.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cI lived in a constant state of fear and stress for the best part of three years and eventually I had to enter what\u2019s known as the hidden homeless. The hidden homeless are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands and do not make the official homeless figures.\u201d<\/p>\n
After three years, he found a place to rent eight months ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI considered myself lucky because I had someone to stay with,\u201d said Mr Leahy.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cThere are so many families who have nowhere to go and are made to enter emergency accommodation.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
He said that through his weekly protest he has heard of people \u201chaving to live in rat-infested squalor\u201d or in \u201cmould-infested hovels\u201d, and that homeless people share stories of staying in emergency accommodation or sleeping on the streets in sleeping bags outside empty buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I started my protest in 2022 it was unimaginable to me that the housing crisis could get any worse,\u201d he said. \u201cThe official homeless figures at that point were just over 10,000. As we head into Christmas 2025 in Ireland, the figure is 16,766 people.\u201d<\/p>\n
He criticised the Government for lifting the eviction ban and said more needs to be done on long-term solutions. \u201cBuild social and affordable housing. It was done before in this very country when the country\u2019s wealth was nothing close to what it is now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf serious action was taken in tackling vacancy and dereliction it could go a long way to solving this crisis. We all see the empty boarded-up buildings in our cities and in our towns. Around 163,000 vacant properties in the country at the moment. The majority require no planning; the structures are already there.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe watch these homes slowly rot in front of our eyes as the housing crisis gets worse and worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know anything about the personal lives of the party members in Government but I\u2019m going to take a guess that none of their children will be homeless this Christmas,\u201d Mr Leahy added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cork musician Martin Leahy, who has been singing his own song about homelessness for 187 weeks outside Leinster…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[79,93,29289,61,60],"class_list":["post-201434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-cork-news","tag-entertainment","tag-homelessness","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}