Single adults locked out of Cork's social housing opportunities

Single adults in Cork are finding it increasingly difficult to exit homelessness, a report has revealed.

Homeless ‘preventions’ for single adults in the South-West more than halved last year compared to the year before, with exit routes from emergency accommodation drying up.

A Cork Simon report has shown that just 5% of single adults in the region left homelessness for a home of their own.

Two in three households on the city’s social housing waiting list are single adults, but just fewer than one in 10 homes in the city are one-bedroom homes.

Entitled ‘Still Waiting’, the seventh paper in Cork Simon Community’s Home Truths series, highlights Government data showing that in May this year, there were 689 people facing homelessness alone in emergency accommodation in Cork and Kerry — almost two thirds more than three years earlier.

In 2023, one in 12 of them moved into a home of their own over the course of the year, but by the final months of 2025, that had fallen to just one in 20.

More than half are now homeless for six months or longer.

Declined more rapidly

Prevention, the work of stopping homelessness before it starts, has declined even more rapidly than exits, with 182 single adults prevented from becoming homeless in 2024, compared to just 88 in 2025.

For every person kept out of homelessness last year, five others came into it for the first time.

‘Dara’, whose name has been changed, has been in emergency accommodation for five years. He became homeless through addiction, but has since gotten clean and found a job, but finding a home is “practically impossible”.

Dara has been on the social housing waiting list for seven years, and said he would take a single flat anywhere, but what is available is mostly three-bedroom houses.

Sophie Johnston, author of the Home Truths series, said: “People facing homelessness alone have been the majority in emergency accommodation in the South-West for years, and it keeps growing.

“What is missing is a response built around them. The homes they need are the homes this city has least of.

"Two in three households on Cork City’s social housing waiting list are single adults. Fewer than one in ten homes in the city are one-bedroom homes.

“People are doing everything they can and still finding there is nowhere to move to.”

She added that the Government’s housing plans do not have any measures in place to address this group’s needs.“A plan to end homelessness by 2030 cannot do it while leaving out three in four of the people who are homeless.”