Emmet Kirwan on becoming Focus Ireland’s ‘No Child Without a Home’ Ambassador: “Child homelessness is entirely preventable”

When Emmet Kirwan arrives for his interview, slipping in during a narrow window between rehearsals and that evening’s performance of A Christmas Carol at the Gate, he brings a quiet focus and grounded energy.

It matches the weight of the moment. Focus Ireland’s Christmas Appeal has just launched and the latest homelessness figures have been released. More than 5,270 children are now homeless across Ireland, the highest number ever recorded, with many facing their second or third Christmas in emergency accommodation. The number of children experiencing homelessness has risen 135% in the last four years.

Focus Ireland’s work carries a long legacy shaped by its founder Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, who passed away earlier this month. Last year, they supported 4,500 children in 2,053 families who were homeless or at risk of losing their home.

This Christmas, Focus is asking the public to back its appeal and to support the petition calling on the Government to act on the charity's Five-Point Plan, which the organisation argues could end child homelessness for good.

Proposals include stopping no-fault evictions, ending evictions caused by unaffordable rents, building enough of the right homes in the right places, prioritising long-term homeless families for social housing, and ensuring that children’s needs and interests are placed first.

“I worked next door to the Focus Kitchen for about three years,” Kirwan says. “So I’ve always known what Focus does. Friends of mine have worked with them for over a decade. I’ve heard the stories, even second-hand, of the work they do to stop someone’s life going into freefall.

“When you become homeless, everything in your life just drops. Focus can arrest that fall. Whether it’s a family coming through the kitchen, someone in addiction, someone who’s just lost their place… they meet people exactly where they are and work from there.”

When the charity asked him to be the ambassador for this year’s ‘No Child Without a Home’ campaign, he didn’t hesitate. Kirwan has lived in the rental market his entire adult life. His experience has sharpened his sense of how precarious things are for ordinary renters.

“You can work hard, raise your family, follow every rule, and still lose your home because a landlord decides to do something else with the property," he says. "People don’t realise how little security renters actually have.”

Some of that, he believes, stems from cultural and political indifference to renters.

“Most of the people making housing policy have never rented. And too many of them are landlords themselves.”

Kirwan argues that when child homelessness figures grow so large, it can hard to see the people in the numbers.

“Numbers become unfathomable," he says. "You hear 10,000 people homeless and it becomes this tragic-but-distant thing. Storytelling cuts through that. It gives agency and dignity back to people who are flattened into statistics.”

His plays Dublin Oldschool and Accents wrestle with the unease of that flattening. Kirwan cites a line from Accents: “It’s the eighth rental gaff in twelve years.”

“When I said that line in the play, it struck a chord with so many people,” he reflects. “The insecurity, the sense of stasis people live within because they can’t make proper plans. They can’t actually become part of a community.”

"People can only hold on to a place for two years. They’re increasing that to six years, but still — at the end of six years, what do you do with your children who have made a life for themselves?”

He points to the families currently living in one-room emergency accommodation.

“Kids doing homework in the same room they sleep in, eat in, bathe in, with no privacy. Waking up on Christmas morning in a single room with parents and siblings. And this is happening in a country with one of the highest tax intakes in our history. That isn’t an accident. That’s policy failure.”

Emmet Kirwan. Photo: Abigail Ring

Kirwan speaks carefully, but he doesn’t blunt the political realities.

“When they lifted the eviction ban, they knew homelessness numbers would rise. They made an ideological decision to protect the right of landlords to evict over the right of families to have homes. So yes, this is a crisis — but it’s a crisis created by political choices.”

His respect for Focus Ireland’s frontline workers, by contrast, is undiluted.

“They fill the vacuum,” he says simply, before telling the story of a young man who came through the Focus Kitchen.

“Within months, they’d built a relationship with him. Then he was linked with addiction support, mental health support, housing assistance. He’s now a family man finishing college. That’s the kind of change Focus can spark when the government doesn’t step in.”

A damaging misconception is that families are homeless due to personal failure or irresponsibility.

“It’s the opposite,” Kirwan says. “Most families experiencing homelessness are working. Many single-parent families are working. Over 90% of single-parent families in homelessness are headed by women, and the cuts to the one-parent family payment in 2014 pushed thousands into poverty. People are working as hard as they can, and it’s still not enough because rents are too high and supports like HAP are too low.

“These are ordinary families. Thirty years ago, they would have been housed in social housing. But that stock was sold off, and governments since haven’t replaced it.”

Focus Ireland’s campaign includes a clear Five-Point Plan to end child homelessness. Kirwan sees it as a roadmap rather than a wish list.

“Ending no-fault evictions has to happen,” he says decisively. “You can’t give someone a home and then treat it like an asset to flip. Build the right homes in the right places. Prioritise long-term homeless families. Increase HAP so families aren’t evicted because rents spiral. And put the best interest of the child at the centre of every decision. If policy doesn’t start from that point, it’s a failure.”

If Kirwan were suddenly appointed Minister for Housing tomorrow, one of his first interventions would be a stricter licensing system for Airbnb:“Right now we have families living in hotels while tourists live in homes. It’s absurd.”

He would also introduce a 60% tax on abandoned properties.

“And public housing," he continues. "Not cost rental. Not affordable rental. A full Vienna-style public housing model where people of all incomes can live with real security. That’s how you build strong communities. That’s how you stop this crisis repeating every generation.

“It’s not complicated. We just don’t have the political will.”

As an artist, Kirwan knows the power of stories. As a renter, he knows the fragility of home. And as an ambassador, he’s trying to collapse the distance between statistics and lived reality.

Because for the more than 5,000 children who will be homeless this Christmas, the crisis isn’t abstract. It’s present-tense. And it’s something this campaign, and Kirwan’s voice within it, refuses to let the country look away from.

Sign Focus Ireland’s petition calling on the Government to act on its Five-Point Plan to end child homelessness for good.