WHEN THE DEPARTMENT of Housing publishes its updated account of homelessness figures at the end of each month, there is often only one mystery: by how much have we broken the record this time?

This month saw Darragh O’Brien’s department release its most dire figures yet, with 14,009 people in Ireland, including 4,206 children, accessing emergency accommodation in April of this year.

These figures do not take into account those living in ‘own-door’ temporary accommodation, domestic violence refuges, asylum seekers, or people who are sleeping rough. Setting aside the height of the Covid pandemic – during which an eviction ban offset the rise in homelessness – Ireland has broken its own homelessness record more than 50 times since 2015. The government, of course, is not setting out to break these records — it’s simply a gift, a talent, something they can’t but help. If failing to tackle homelessness was an Olympic sport, we’d be going for gold in Paris this summer.

It may not the lightest note to start on but, some weeks, the news is really nothing but a series of things going wrong. So, what else?

The opening of the National Children’s Hospital has been pushed back once again, meaning that unfortunately, it is very unlikely to open on the date that was originally promised, not least because that date was four years ago, and we can’t time travel because we spent all of our pocket money on the National Children’s Hospital instead of on experimental physics.

Speaking in the Dáil this week, Tánaiste Micheál Martin laid the blame for the latest delay squarely at the feet of BAM, the company that the government is paying €2 billion to build the NCH. While BAM say that accommodating “the level of ongoing design change and the implications this has on the delivery of our agreed work programme” is what explains the project going over-budget by 54% and failing to stay on schedule by half a decade, Micheál Martin said that the delays are “likely to be part of a commercial strategy by BAM to try and extract more money and more funding from the Irish people”. 

It was a strident and surprisingly combative contribution from the former Taoiseach, who was also Minister for Health in a past life (why do we say that? He was very much Minister for Health in this life. It was between 2000 and 2004). However, it is unlikely that the public at large will absolve the government for its own role in the calamitous gestation of what is now the world’s most expensively-built hospital (and yes, that does include hospitals that are actually open).

Even Junior Cert business studies students will be familiar with the principle of caveat emptor – buyer beware. That the government has been able to neither keep the costs down nor expedite the process makes them look ineffectual at best, startlingly foolish at wors— Actually, even ‘startlingly foolish’ is a pretty generous estimation at this stage in the game.

The government’s attempt to divest itself from blame in this situation is unlikely to win much sympathy from the public. It takes two to tango, after all – and the more time the government and BAM spend tangoing the less time they spend building the damn hospital.

The Irish public has received years of assurances from the government with respect to the hospital’s eventual opening. In 2016 then-Minister for Health Leo Varadkar said that the hospital would be open by 2020 “short of an asteroid hitting the planet”. Most recently, the public was told that the hospital would be open to the public by October of 2024. The public’s credulity has long been stretched well beyond its own tensile strength, and the benefit of the doubt has long since run out. If Samuel Beckett were still alive he’d write a tragicomedy in two acts about it.

In the eight years since construction began, the largest single capital infrastructure project in Irish history has become little more than a source of frustration to the public at large. The good news is that BAM say the hospital is 92% complete. Of course, they also said it was 92% complete in October of last year, so that’s starting to feel like when you tell your friend you’re 15 minutes away from the cinema when you haven’t left the gaff yet.

This is utterly inappropriate. The Israeli flag is flying in Leinster House in the week that we recognised the State of Palestine and while the bombardment of innocent Palestinian civilians continues. This needs to be taken down immediately. #CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/AY5Vhub22j

— Lynn Boylan 🍷📖🐾 (@LNBDublin) May 31, 2024

The reverberations of Sunday night’s deadly IDF airstrike on a displaced people’s camp in Rafah were felt globally this week, not least in Ireland, where Taoiseach Simon Harris said that the EU could be doing “a hell of a lot more” to help the people of Gaza. 

Rhetorically, it sounded as though Harris was ready to ratchet up Irish pressure on the international community to rein in Israel’s campaign in the city, which has killed 60 people and injured 280 more in 24-hour period before the time of writing. 

Given this momentum in opposition to Israel’s war effort, and condemnation of the strike, it therefore struck many as strange that the Oireachtas would choose to fly the Israeli flag beside the Palestinian flag inside Leinster House, sandwiched between the Ireland flag and United Nations ensign. 

The decision has been roundly condemned by several Irish political parties, with European Election candidate for Sinn Féin Lynn Boylan posting on Twitter: “This is utterly inappropriate. The Israeli flag is flying in Leinster House in the week that we recognised the State of Palestine and while the bombardment of innocent Palestinian civilians continues. This needs to be taken down immediately.”

According to a statement issued by Leinster House on Friday evening, the decision was taken by Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Faerghaíl who “asked for both flags to fly side by side, for one day, as an expression of the need for a two-state peaceful resolution”.

It is an equivocation at a time when events in Gaza only become less ambiguous day-by-day, and the public’s outrage and disgust only becomes more clear. The idea that the move, in the aftermath of one of the war’s most highly-publicised massacres, perpetrated under one of the banners now flying in Leinster House, would be perceived by the public at large as an expression of peace was misguided to the point that one can scarcely believe anyone thought it was a good idea.