Minister’s haphazard legislation will create new legal barriers to shelter for homeless people in crisis.

Guaranteeing shelter is long-term Irish policy

After Jonathan Corrie died in a doorway across from Leinster House in December 2014, then Minister for Housing, Alan Kelly, declared that every person who was sleeping rough would be offered a shelter bed, without conditions.

He was not the first Minister to offer such assurances, and he would not be the last.

Minister Darragh O’Brien was most explicit, telling RTE in 2021: “I’ve been very clear: there is no barrier to any person who needs emergency accommodation.”

However, in legislation currently being hurried through the Dáil, Minister James Browne appears to want to abandon this approach, introducing new administrative barriers for access to shelter. In doing so he will deprive himself of the reassuring statement that beds are available, and it is only the complex challenges that some homeless people experience that make them ‘chose’ to sleep rough.

Of course, the reality behind such reassurance was always more complex, yet the policy of seeing emergency shelter as a basic right has shaped the way Irish homeless services have developed. But its positive outcomes are also clear, a recent study of homelessness in 35 European cities showed that, while Dublin and Cork have amongst the highest levels of homelessness per head of the population, they have among the lowest proportion of their homeless people experiencing the extreme vulnerability of sleeping rough.

All this reflects a political understanding that Irish public opinion cares about homelessness but is particularly moved by the vulnerability of people who have to sleep rough.

What barriers would the new law introduce?

This policy is set to change when an (as yet unpublished) section of the Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026 introduces a new legal barrier to anyone seeking shelter, requiring that they prove to local authority staff that they are ‘Habitually Resident’ in Ireland. This Habitual Residence Condition (HRC) seems like a straightforward idea but turns out to be a complex legal issue subject to a number of thorny rulings in EU law. HRC already applies for access to most welfare payments, and the Department of Social Protection has established specialist decision making and a robust appeals systems to deal with the complexities involved. People have protections while their welfare appeal is being heard.

The problem for the homeless system is that, in order to prove Habitual Residence, people may have to produce official documents or proofs that they lived in particular places at particular times. These are the sort of documents that require time and a degree of stability to get together – and certainly not the sort of thing you will have on you when you contact the local authority, desperately needing shelter because you are fleeing domestic violence, are in a mental health crisis or have just been evicted from your home. The inevitable consequence of this legislation is that people in crisis will be denied emergency shelter and be forced to sleep on the street or in some other

There are other provisions in the Bill, including one to apply Habitual Residence as a condition for getting on the social housing list.  In contrast to the provision on shelter, it is hard to find anyone who objects to this in principle: social housing is too important a public resource to offer to someone who is not planning to stay and make it their home. The concerns of homeless organisations and legal experts here are about fair process – the proposed appeals system is a yellow pack version of the Social Protection system in which local authorities get to check their own homework. Again, in contrast to the Social Protection system, every member of a household will have to be HRC compliant before anyone can be approved.

There is also an objection that this social housing rule is not needed at all. Far-right agitators claim, without evidence, that non-Irish people get unfair access to social housing. Rather than tell them that they are simply wrong and that existing requirements ensure that no-one without a long term commitment to living in Ireland is allocated social housing, the Government seems to have decided to legislate for their prejudice. Whether this will disarm them or just convince them that they were right in the first place remains to be seen.

With goodwill and time, these concerns about access to housing lists could be addressed: social housing is the sort of thing that a complex regulation like HRC can reasonably apply to.

But access to emergency shelter is different.

For too long homeless shelters were seen only as a way of managing homelessness, but Government policy has gradually come to recognise that effective emergency accommodation should provide a stepping stone back into settled housing. This

‘housing led’ approach to homelessness is real progress.  But this is not the only role for shelter, sometimes it must fulfil a separate more fundamental humanitarian function as an immediate safety net for people in crisis.

If we have any concept of human rights, we know that shelter is among the most basic of them. People should not have to first prove they can exit homelessness into housing before they are offered shelter, any more than people should be turned away by a hospital if they can’t prove they will get well.  By proposing new administrative barriers, without providing any wording until the last minute or entering into discussion with people on the front-line, the Minister is threatening this humanitarian aspect role of shelter.

One of the perplexing aspects of this haphazard and high handed approach is that it comes in the midst of a range of progressive projects which have involved the Minister and his officials in the most collaborative engagement with the homeless sector since the abandonment of social partnership. A new ‘Children and Family Homeless Action Plan’ is due this summer and a new ‘Homeless Prevention Framework’, based on the work of leading researchers Suzanne Fitzpatrick and Peter Mackie, will be published in the autumn. The Misc. Bill will also include a long-needed ‘best interest of the child’ rule, which Focus Ireland has spent a decade campaigning for – though the wording for this is also unpublished as yet. It is unclear why the Minister is choosing to undermine all this hard, collaborative progress by driving through ill considered, punitive new laws which will do nothing to tackle the reality of homelessness.

Safety net

The Minister seems to glimpse that applying HRC to emergency shelter might be a mistake when he talks of a ‘safety net’ through which the local authority can provide shelter on a ‘night-by-night’ basis when HRC cannot be proven. Because the wording for this important new legislation has also been withheld and will only be published at Report stage, just before it is voted into law, it is impossible to know how this will work.  But the language here of ‘safety nets’ is alarming.

Emergency shelters were first set up by charities like the Society of St Vincent De Paul and the Simon Communities precisely as a safety net for the most vulnerable, who were then being failed by the state. Emergency shelter is the safety net.

When we realised we will need a new safety net to protect the people who will fall through the gashes we are cutting in the old safety net, isn’t it time to step back and reconsider?

There is still an opportunity for the Minister to come forward with wording which will give legal foundation to all those assurances from his Ministerial predecessors  and reflect the values of Irish society: access to emergency shelter should be provided to anyone who requires it. If there are to be regulations on HRC, secure shelter should always be provided while people have a genuine opportunity to make their case in a fair, independent process.