IT’S BEEN HOT this week. That’s fair to say. The temperatures have been high. Higher than usual, like. Not quite record-breaking in the way that we might have expected, but sure look. Next year we’ll be prepared. We’ll do a proper sacrifice to Ra the Sun God before the Leaving Cert even starts, and we’ll finally break that warm glass ceiling. 

The thing is, though, I haven’t been hot. Whatever it is about the location of my apartment, the entire thing seems to be in the shade from all directions, and had I not ventured outside in the evenings, then at no point would I have noticed there was anything different about the days’ temperature. But just because this week wasn’t really all that hot for me, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hot. 

Met Éireann, for example, had to issue warnings about how hot it was. One imagines that construction workers or bus drivers or anybody by an office window must have felt like ants trying to hit their KPIs while under a magnifying glass. It’s important to retain the perspective that just because you aren’t personally experiencing something doesn’t mean that thing isn’t real or that it isn’t affecting others. I am going somewhere with this.

This week, Minister for Housing James Browne told interviewer Gavan Reilly he would no longer be giving estimates for when homelessness figures are expected to, you know, stop rising. Browne explained that this was because it was “very difficult to model” when homelessness figures would drop. Difficult to model? No. High heels made out of jelly are “difficult to model”. The drop in homelessness figures isn’t difficult to model; it’s just that homelessness figures aren’t meaningfully dropping despite minor fluctuations (this month, for example, the number of people accessing homelessness services dropped by 0.5%, but is up 66% against June four years ago). 

A cornerstone of Browne’s approach as housing minister has been........

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