Report shines light on ‘invisible’ homeless

People sleeping in cars, couch surfing, leaving prison or hospital, and facing homelessness alone are falling through the cracks of Ireland’s current homeless measurement system.

That’s according to a new report commissioned by homeless charity Cork Simon Community and developed by Joe Finnerty, School of Applied Social Studies, UCC.

Every week, Cork Simon’s outreach teams meet people whose experience of homelessness doesn't show up in any official figure. The charity commissioned this new research to answer the gap between the figures and reality.

The report is built around an important insight: what is not named, defined, and measured, is not noticed.

The report, entitled ‘Housing Counts: Mapping and Measuring Severe Housing Exclusion in Cork’, was launched yesterday morning (Wednesday) at 1 Horgan's Quay.

It proposes the development of a Cork Observatory on Severe Housing Exclusion, modelled on similar initiatives in other European cities.

Speaking about the new report, Dermot Kavanagh, CEO of Cork Simon Community, said the people being overlooked by current measurement methods must be recognised.

He said: “At Cork Simon, we believe in people. And we believe people experiencing homelessness deserve to be seen.”

“This isn’t really a report about data; it’s a report about the people behind the data, and about making sure they’re not invisible to the policies and services meant to support them.”

At the heart of the report is a new framework, developed by UCC’s Joe Finnerty, that brings together two leading international approaches; the ETHOS typology of homelessness and housing exclusion, developed by European homelessness prevention agency FEANTSA, and the five-stage prevention model developed by Fitzpatrick, Mackie and Wood (2021).

To these approaches, Mr Finnerty’s report adds an organisational dimension that distinguishes between people who apply for support and those who are deemed eligible - a distinction that often determines whether someone appears in the official figures at all.

The result is a systematic map of severe housing exclusion in Cork, within which gaps can be clearly identified. It is the first time that Cork’s existing data sources have been set out alongside the categories they capture - and the categories they miss. Joe Finnerty described his report as “a starting point, not a finished answer”.

He said: “I’ve spent more than 30 years looking at how people end up in homelessness, how they get out of it, and how the indicators we choose end up shaping the policies we get. And the same pattern keeps showing up: when our definitions are narrow and our measurement is partial, whole groups of people may drop out of view - and out of policy.”

Phase 2 of the research, due for publication in September 2026, will engage Cork’s key organisational stakeholders on how current measurement and reporting practices might be modified to better capture the full range of severe housing exclusion in the city and region.

The full report launched on Wednesday is available for download now via corksimon.ie/housing-counts.