“Housing First works best when it is high quality, consistent and for as long as necessary,” says Samara Jones, coordinator of the Housing First Europe Hub.
When the Housing First model – that of simply giving a home and supports to those who are long-term homeless – was piloted in Ireland in 2011, and launched fully in 2014, the main challenge was getting enough homes.
But then the story got a lot more complicated.
In 2019, the Peter McVerry Trust got the contract to run the Housing First programme in Dublin, after bidding a lot less than the cost of running the service, according to The Currency.
After a man was murdered in a council flat rented under a Housing First tenancy, staff started to speak out about high case loads and inadequate training and support.
Last summer, the Housing Agency and the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) put out a tender for companies to run the Housing First programme going forward.
The documents stipulated that the new provider would need to be in a position to take on the tenancies once awarded the contract, with a resource plan done within three months of the date of award so the service can start.
No organisation bid for the largest contract.
In the meantime, the programme is paused to new referrals meaning it’s not taking on any more people who need homes. There are ongoing concerns about quality of support offered to existing tenants, and about a quarter of people’s tenancies in Dublin have failed.
Samara Jones, coordinator of the Housing First Europe Hub, says that while Dublin has faced some problems that are common to other European cities – like the struggle to get enough homes to roll out – she hasn’t heard of other cities facing the same problems while tendering.
“Housing First works best when it is high quality, consistent and for as long as necessary,” says Jones. “If a service has to shut down or hand over its clients after two years or five years, that is not necessarily in the spirit of Housing First.”
Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin says the government needs to find another way of funding homeless services within EU rules, because the competitive tendering process appears to be part of the problem.
“These are the most vulnerable cohort of homeless people,” Ó Broin says. “Their lives depend on the support they get from these organisations.”
Last summer, the Housing Agency, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and the HSE tendered for homeless support services to manage Housing First tenancies in Dublin for three years initially, with a possible extension of two more years.
They broke the tenancies into three bundles for three separate operators to run.
The largest bundle was for 50 percent of the existing tenancies and 50 percent of new tenancies, that is to manage 253 existing Housing First tenancies and to bring in 350 more tenants over the four years, from 2024 to 2028.
The Housing Agency got feedback that suggested “that timing in terms of capacity of the NGO Sector at the time of tender was a concern”, a spokesperson said. “It is a significant commitment for any NGO to undertake and we are working closely with the sector to support them.”
Homeless charities Focus Ireland and Depaul successfully bid for the smaller bundles for 30 percent and 20 percent of the Housing First programme.
A spokesperson for the Housing Agency didn't respond in time for publication to a query about why those smaller agreements haven’t been activated and work begun to transfer some of the clients.
The spokesperson did say that the Housing First programme will start taking new referrals again, once the new contracts are in place.
Mike Allen, director of advocacy with Focus Ireland, says the organisation is ready to start work as soon as possible, with the tenants they signed up for.
“We are happy to work with more Housing First tenants in Dublin if we are given an appropriate period of time to build up the teams that would be required to provide that support,” says Allen.
Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD, asked in Dáil questions in May what was happening with the tender, and how the delay was impacting supports to existing Housing First tenants, as well as others who need to access the programme.
By phone on Wednesday, Ó Broin said the tendering for the programme is a mess. “At the centre of the near collapse of the McVerry Trust was their underbidding for the Housing First programme,” he says. “Because they underbid and were underfunded, they were running it really badly.”
He says the trust didn’t employ staff with the appropriate skillset, or provide them with the right training and supervision, and this resulted in high staff turnover.
As of today, “I’m dealing with people who aren’t getting the support, or are getting very limited support,” says Ó Broin.
He has a constituent who is in Housing First and who isn’t getting the mental health supports they need, and Ó Broin says he knows others that would be suitable for Housing First, but can’t access the programme.
He said he understands that no homeless charity bid for the largest bundle of tenancies, because they couldn’t deliver in the timeframe required.
A spokesperson for the Peter McVerry Trust said Thursday they didn’t wish to respond to queries about the quality of services it provides to Housing First tenants.
The spokesperson for the Housing Agency says: “The Trust has very skilled front-line teams and Intensive Case Managers who have a long association working with the HF tenants in the Dublin Region.”
In response to Ó Broin’s questions in the Dáil in May, the Minister for Housing, Fianna Fáil TD James Browne, said the new contracts were due to be sorted out that month.
“The contracts for the majority of the service covered in Lot 2, 3 and 4 in the Dublin Region are expected to be agreed in the coming month, while Lot 1 will be re-issued as a stand-alone tender,” said Browne. (Lot 4 is for medical services.)
Conor Reddy, a People Before Profit Councillor on Dublin City Council, flagged another issue.
He says that the Housing First caseloads envisaged in the new contracts are still too high, with 10 to 12 high-need Housing First tenants assigned to each worker.
“My understanding is that in other EU countries that run Housing First programmes, each worker has a very small caseload,” says Reddy.
Jones, coordinator at the Housing First Europe Hub, says that for housing first programmes where tenants have complex needs, the case load should be a maximum of seven clients for each social care worker.
In response to Ó Broin’s questions, the Minister for Housing, Browne, said that at a national level the Housing First programme is meeting its targets for taking on new tenants.
“Both 2023 and 2024 saw the tenancy targets being met and the programme remains on course to meet its overall target of 1,319 tenancies by the end of 2026,” he said in a formal response to a Dáil question.
Half of all Housing First tenancies in Ireland are in the Dublin region, where the programme has been suspended for the last year. So, if true, the growth would have had to be in the rest of the country.
Zooming in on the Dublin figures, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive’s homeless action plan says it created 111 new Housing First tenancies in 2024.
But the Department of Housing's homelessness data says there were only 26 more tenants in the Housing First programme in Dublin at the end of 2024 then there were at the end of 2023.
That suggests 85 tenancies were lost last year in Dublin. Some of those people could have been re-housed in a new home and then counted as a new tenancy, others may have dropped out of the programme.
At last count in May 2025 there were fewer people in the programme in Dublin compared to December 2024– though there were more, nationally.
As well as recruiting tenants into the programme, another major target for Housing First is sustaining tenancies.
While 24 percent of tenancies broke down, that doesn't mean that all of those people exited the Housing First programme, the spokesperson for the Housing Agency said.
“Tenants are often moved depending on circumstances around their life at any given time and sometimes a second or third tenancy is required to be successful and an acknowledged part of the programme,” he says.
The issues in Dublin are not replicated across Ireland, says Allen of Focus Ireland, which runs the programme in some other parts of the country. “Where contracts are properly constructed and funded it's working well.”
In rural areas, there can be issues for workers travelling long distances between clients, he says, but overall the programme is a success. “Lots of people, who would otherwise be in emergency accommodation or on the streets, are in housing,” says Allen.
There are common challenges across European cities, says Jones, of the Housing First Europe Hub. Securing the homes needed for the programme is often challenging, as lots of cities are facing housing crises, she says.
Some governments also struggle to accept that people in housing first programmes need the supports to be available indefinitely, which can be expensive, says Jones. But she says, “these are people who will likely need intensive supports no matter where they are living”.
Finland is often held up as a model of excellence in running a housing first scheme. Jones says the government there went further than New York, which pioneered housing first and focused the approach at long-term homeless people with complex needs.
Finland applied the model to its whole homeless system, which resulted in substantial decreases in homelessness, she says.
The government in Finland substantially increased funding to local government for social housing. “There is a lot of investment in Finland in developing enough social housing to be able to absorb this,” she says.
Allen says there are rough sleepers in Finland, but they are mostly people who cannot access the public housing system, such as asylum seekers.
Jones says that Dublin has done some things well too. For example she commends the local authorities in Dublin for prioritising Housing First tenants when they allocate social housing.
Those, formerly homeless people then have a permanent home and the Housing First programme offers support to them. In some other cities, the Housing First staff try to find most of the homes on the private market, which Jones says is very challenging.
In other cities where the operators have to rely on securing housing on the private market, that is very challenging, she says.
Still, the Dublin authorities seem to have run into unusual difficulties around tendering for operators. “A lot of places use NGOs as operators of the services,” she says. “I don’t think anyone has had such a fraught tendering approach.”
She doesn’t know exactly what went wrong, she says, but in general it would be better to work in collaboration with homeless services providers, she says.
“I don’t think there is any ill will of anybody in Ireland working in Housing First,” says Jones. “They want to do a great job.”
Despite the challenges, she says that the housing-first approach is still the only solution to long-term homelessness.
“The most amazing thing is that people now recognise that a house is what people need, to end homelessness – not a shelter,” says Jones.
Commissioned by Dublin Region Homeless Executive, the review was done to inform the agency’s latest action plan for homelessness.
“We have an over-reliance on the private sector, it is expensive, it is poor value for money,” says Mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive.
“You shouldn’t need a solicitor to access homeless services,” says Adam Boyle, of the Mercy Law Resource Centre.
A spokesperson for the Dublin Region Homeless Executive said its priority was “to ensure there is an adequate provision of accommodation for people experiencing homelessness”.
