As Brendan Courtney's Instagram followers will know, the presenter and designer is knee-deep in putting the finishing touches on his new home - something he is clearly relishing. "I'm so lucky, I'm fortunate, I'm blessed", he stresses over the phone.
For him, it's more than the joy of owning a home.
Not only has Courtney devoted a substantial portion of his career to homes and how we can access them, from This Crowded House, where he examined young people stuck living with their parents, to The Keys to My Life, where he and his guests reflected on the importance of their personal spaces. He's also been homeless before.
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"I broke up with somebody after a long term relationship, we had rented a house and of course, as you do when you're breaking up with somebody, you leave", he says. "And I left and went to a hotel and I stayed in a hotel until my credit card maxed."
He adds: "I ended up buying an apartment from the council in the end, a year later. It caused an emergency reaction in my head, but I never used the phrase until I started with this campaign last year."
He did, he asserts, have a "back up plan" in the form of his parents, but he's keenly aware of how this is not always the case for people. Now, years later, he can understand how lucky he was to avoid slipping through the cracks.
"If I had, say, a slightly more traumatic childhood, or if I had been part of something not so savoury, I could have flipped further down into homelessness and stayed there. If I had a bad relationship with my family, I couldn't come home."
Courtney is working with Focus Ireland on their Shine a Light campaign, which spotlights the prevalence of family homelessness and the profoundly negative impact it leaves on young people.
According to their research, 2,096 families are currently in emergency accommodation in Ireland, of which 4,401 people are children.
The campaign invites people to spread awareness by hosting or taking part in sleep outs on 11 October, to raise funds to help end family homelessness. There will be organised sleep outs will also be taking place at TU Dublin Grangegorman in Dublin and Cork's historic City Gaol on the night.
Living in Dublin city, Courtney sees says he sees "homelessness everywhere, all the way, all around me, all the time", he says. At this time of year especially, he thinks about "the little kid who has to go from maybe a hotel room to school".
While we're not unique in our housing crisis, with Portugal, Croatia and Norway just some of the other European countries enduring the same issue, Courtney is emphatic about what he sees as our innately Irish mentality toward it: "We are a largely capitalist country with a small social conscience, but the social conscience isn't good enough because it's not fixing the problem.
"It's a really important part of our culture because of our legacy of occupation and colonialism. Home and having our own home is in our Constitution, that a family is entitled to a home. And we're failing these families year on year, and it's very sad."
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Speaking about how we used to view homelessness, Courtney says there has been a definite shift away from viewing it as a "choice" made by the person themselves.
"We saw it as almost like it happens to them, not to us. Now we see it as we see people as victims now of homelessness. We understand that it's a horrible thing that can happen to anyone because across the board, housing and homes is a massive problem for every family."
More than that, he feels we're more aware of the connection between homelessness and mental health. Brendan says, "we're acknowledging that people who are homeless are probably the result of some trauma". This, he adds, is "compounded by a very f***ing fragile housing market".
Indeed, in 2007, Focus Ireland undertook the Homeless Pathways study to gain an improved understanding of individual pathways into, through and out of homelessness.
The study found that risk factors and triggers that people experienced which led to their homelessness included loss of a tenancy and insecure housing, family breakdown, alcohol and/or drug addiction, mental ill health and stress, and voluntarily giving up a tenancy because of victimization/harassment.
The stain of the housing crisis is a deep one, Courtney surmises: "I think the housing crisis will be what we'll talk about, the effects of it, the long-tell effects of it, because it's not going to be fixed soon."
For more information on Shine A Light 2024, click here.
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