We desperately need leadership and collaboration to tackle homelessness, but do we need a Tsar?

At one level ending homelessness is very simple. For most of the 17,885 people who are homeless (August 2026), it just requires the provision of affordable, accessible housing. The minority of homeless people who have complex support needs also require integrated therapeutic and tenancy supports. The trouble is that we find it very difficult to deliver these quite simple things. Delivering them in a consistent and integrated way over time gets very complicated.

The homeless sector is full of metaphors to describe the frustrations of this complexity ‘getting the ducks in row’ or ‘getting all the plates spinning’. Just when you think you are going to be able to move forward, staff or budgets in one crucial agency come under pressure and your carefully planned initiative collapses.

Sometimes it seems that what we need is one person who can cut through all the complexities and just tell people in a whole range of separate agencies what to do. We need someone to instruct everyone to prioritise the actions necessary for our project above the range of other demands that are being made on them.

For some reason, this single effective person tends to be referred to as a Tsar. The yearning for a Tsar came upon the Minister for Housing, James Browne a few months ago. More recently, Catherine Kenny, the CEO of Dublin Simon Community, after long experience of delivering effective services in a disjointed system, also reflected that the appointment of a Homeless Tsar might be just what we need.

If we put to one side for a moment the fact that the actual Tsars were notoriously bad at achieving any of their goals and frequently ended up being assassinated as a result, it’s worth looking at whether giving one person such a powerful role would provide the solutions.

One potentially Tsar-shaped gap emerges in the creeping withdrawal of high level HSE engagement with the Government’s flag-ship Housing First programme. A number of regions have experienced similar issues where effective multidiscipline teams have lost senior therapeutic staff, such as psychologists, as a result of a promotion or job change. The HSE does not fill the post and the Housing First team struggles to regroup, using locums or less well qualified case workers to fill the gaps. Tenants suffer and the risk of them returning to homelessness increases.

The lack of a single powerful, coordinating presence could not be clearer.

The problem is that the reason the post has not been filled is the HSE recruitment embargo. To solve this problem our Tsar would have to countermand the instructions of the CEO of the HSE, the Minister for Health and indeed the Minister for Finance. You don’t need to be a member of the Fiscal Advisory Council to see the issues that arise.

The intersection of two Governmental weaknesses

Despite the Tsarist headline, the heart of Kenny’s comments was the expression of deep frustration which is felt right across the sector, in both statutory and the voluntary organisations, that individual effort is not turning into collective success.

The experience of writing about the development of homeless services since the foundation of the state (Understanding Homelessness in Ireland Since Independence: Decades in the Making, 2026,  O’Sullivan, Allen and Sheridan) reinforced my sense that policies of collaborative action have been more successful than top-down instruction.

The problem here is that homelessness lies at the intersection of two of the greatest failures of the Irish state. The first being the profound powerlessness of local government and the second being the persistent incapacity of different departments and agencies within the Irish state to cooperate effectively on any shared project.

The powerlessness of local government

Local government is crucial in tackling homelessness because each local authority is both the ‘housing authority’ in its locality and the legally responsible body for responding to homelessness. In principle, local authorities can set their own policies and priorities, linking their housing supply to their homeless challenge.  But since they rely almost entirely for their funding on central government, the Custom House can refuse or delay approval of anything they don’t like. It works the other way too. The Custom House can launch a strategic initiative and find funding for it, but a local authority can refuse, delay or distort its implementation.

Local and national government have the power to each frustrate the intentions of the other, and habitually do so. This has the benefit of limiting ill-considered expensive new ideas but is not very good at curtailing expensive existing ideas – like making the provision of emergency shelter by for-profit companies the cornerstone of policy.  Central Government fully funds local authorities to build social housing and also 90% funds local authorities to provide homeless shelters, but there is little connection between the two. Despite never meeting its targets, the construction of social housing has increased significantly in recent years, but the number of households moving out of expensive emergency accommodation into the new housing has not increased at anything like the same rate.  Central Government wants increased social housing supply to have greater impact in reducing homelessness and some councils have attempted to deliver this.  But the Custom House has never attempted to align the objectives of its housing and homelessness funding streams – there is no policy of making Central Government funding for the construction of social housing contingent on Local Government moving people out of expensive emergency accommodation in that housing.

A further problem for Irish local government is that, unlike local authorities in most other countries, they have no role in the provision of health or social services in their area, so must convince other state agencies to provide these essential elements. The legislative responsibility of local authorities to respond to homelessness does not come with the legal capacity to do so.

Government departments and agencies struggle to work collaboratively

This dysfunctional relationship between local authorities and national government is a specific example of the second problem – the inability of Irish departments and agencies to work collaboratively on any joint project.

For such a small country this collaboration failure has been remarkably consistent since the foundation of the state. Since before the Departments of Housing and Health came into separate existence, they have been in a continual and ineffectual argument about whether the housing or health unit is responsible for (or rather, not responsible) responding to homelessness. This inability to decide on distinct roles continues to this day and is the subject of at least one working group under the current housing strategy. When we add in the need for collaboration with the Departments of Education, of Children and of Justice and Health, along with Tusla, the HSE, and the Gardai we can see why this lack of collaborative capacity undermines our efforts to tackle the complex parts of homelessness.

There was a brief period, the decade or so of Social Partnership, where state agencies and departments had a place where they could work together to achieve nationally-set goals. When we think of social partnership, we usually think of it in terms of trade unions and employers sitting around the table to determine wages and other social expenditure. Perhaps we remember that the community sector, the farmers and, eventually, environmental organisations also had a seat at the table.

But an equally significant aspect of social partnership was that it created a space in which government departments and agencies could collaborate to deliver clearly set national objectives, solving the problems that arise in any shared project – problems like the conflict between the HSE’s recruitment embargo, the essential role of mental health professionals in Housing First and the fact that Housing First is a flag-ship priority.

The jettisoning of social partnership after the 2008 crash did not just evict the trade unions and employers from the tables of government, it closed the door on all the places where state agencies and departments could meet to resolve problems. This happened at the same time as austerity cutbacks in staffing and expenditure led to public servants retreating back to their own offices. More recently, some cross departmental structures have been put back in place, but these tend not to be part of any collective plan. They involve officials from one department being invited to a meeting convened by a different department, where they sit and wonder how they can scuttle back to their own familiar offices without having agreed to do anything meaningful to assist the other department in achieving its goals.

On the rare occasions where a conscientious civil servant mistakenly makes a commitment to offer a change in policy or to share resources, this is almost always later countermanded by more senior managers, scuppering whatever project had been discussed.

Above all else, what tackling homelessness requires is the capacity of different agencies, departments and NGOs to work together to close up the gaps which people fall through. And it is just that capacity that we seem to lack.

Systems exist for this.

The irony is that all the structures exist to achieve that. At Governmental level there is a Cabinet Sub-committee dealing with housing which involves the Ministers and top civil servants from all the required department and which, from time to time, turns its full attention to the issue of homeless. At Departmental level we have a National Homeless Action Committee (NHAC), chaired by the Minister for Housing, including senior officials from the appropriate departments, representatives of local government, along with the CEOs of the main NGOs tackling homelessness. Closer to the ground, we have regional consultative forums, which also bring together local authorities, the local representatives of other agencies such as Tusla and the HSE along with local leaders of the homeless NGOs. Each regional homeless authority produces a strategy every three years. There is a Director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive who is a senior local government official. There is a National Director of Housing First, based in the Housing Agency. There are also Strategic Policy Committees in each local authority with responsibility for housing and homelessness, where officials, Councillors and representatives of local NGOs meet to discuss local challenges.

This could be the central nervous system of a project to reduce homelessness, passing information, ideas and solution up and down and across all the agencies needed to tackle homelessness.  But it doesn’t work like that. If NHAC sets up a key sub-committee but crucial departments fail to nominate representatives or turn up, this failure is not reported back to NHAC. So, the senior civil servants at NHAC are not able to fix the problem.  The engagement of the senior staff is not used to send a Department-wide message that engagement in this tackling-homelessness project is a priority. Instead, the opposite message is unmistakably communicated: the Government statement that homelessness is one of its top priorities has implications for the Department of Housing but not for anyone else.

NHAC receives no reports from the Cabinet Sub-Committee about what it discussed or what is concerning it, and it sends no reports upwards to Cabinet.  Equally, NHAC does not receive reports from the Regional Forums about what is working and what national policies or resources would make things work better. Needless to say, NHAC sends no reports to the Regional Forums or asks them any questions.

Instead of forming the spine for an active, responsive system, these potential links remain unconnected, like the dry, scattered vertebrae of some fossilized lizard.

These forums and action committees are the organic, democratic institutions of Irish society. If connected up and brought to life, they would form a direct connection from the front-line of homelessness in every town and city through to a Cabinet Committee chaired by the Taoiseach. If we are looking for one powerful person who is needed to send the message throughout the system that homelessness is a real priority and tackling it must sometimes mean setting aside other instructions, we have that person. He is the Taoiseach, and his democratic authority needs to flow down through his Minister for Housing, but also his Ministers for Health, Children, Justice and Education. This, in turn, would assist the officials, the Directors of Housing First and the DRHE, who are already doing the hard work, to get greater collaboration and play their roles more effectively. The hard work being done by the NGOs and by the statutory agencies would start to align and start producing results.

None of this has the glamour or headline-generating capacity of a Tsar, but it is this meticulous work of purposeful connection and collaboration which our system needs if it is to start to overcome the complexities of the homelessness crisis and start to reduce the number of people whose lives are being needlessly blighted by prolonged homelessness.