IT MAY sound harsh but it’s true. In 20 years time, we’ll be populating our prisons with the children we’re neglecting now.

And maybe in 20 years time we’ll be setting up a tribunal of enquiry to try to figure out how we so badly let down a generation of young children. We’ll look back and say, “3,000 homeless children in a rapidly growing economy. What a scandal that was. How in the name of heaven did we allow that to happen?” Of course, it will be too late then. A child raised in homelessness has a much higher chance of starting school behind, and struggling in his or her early years in school. That child has a much higher chance, as a direct consequence, of dropping out of school early. A much higher chance of getting involved in gangs, in antisocial behaviour, in criminality, and in jail. A much lower chance of holding down a career, of building good relationships.

We’re doing all that, every day we leave a child without a safe and secure home. We’re trying to guarantee those children a lifetime of social welfare dependency. We’re trying to turn them into the fathers and mothers of the homeless children of the future. We’re trying, as hard as we can, to create spirals that will never end.

This is nonsense, and it’s criminal nonsense. In the 1970s, when I reached political adulthood, there was a massive economic crisis in Ireland, caused initially by an international oil crisis. Young people nowadays don’t remember the queues for petrol, and the effective rationing that had to be introduced. And in those years we had to introduce deficit budgeting for more or less the first time.

But in every year of that hard decade we built houses — 5,000 or so local authority houses a year out of a building stock of more than 20,000 annually.

Throughout the 1980s, economic crisis deepened. The national debt doubled in the four years that Garret FitzGerald was taoiseach in the middle of that decade. But each year, despite our problems, we took it for granted that the role of the State in the provision of housing had to be sustained. Thousands more local authority houses were funded and built each year throughout a painful period of retrenchment.

At the end of that decade, health services were cut to an extent they have never recovered from. Some 3,000 hospital beds were removed from the system over a couple of years. In that same couple of years, despite the kind of austerity that earned the then finance minister the nickname of “Mac the Knife”, more than 5,000 local authority houses were built.

It was the same in the 1990s, a decade that started with a major currency crisis and the devaluing of our currency, a decade that required careful and conservative management of public finances, but which ended with the first signs of strong economic growth. In each year of that decade too, we built thousands of local authority houses.

They’re the decades I can remember from my own experience. But for 60 or 70 years in Ireland, the building of the housing stock was seen as the job of government. From huge housing estates in Dublin to single rural dwellings in Kerry, local authorities employed tradesmen, labourers, engineers, planners and architects to get the job of housing done.

And then it stopped. With a crash. Not because we couldn’t afford it — because suddenly we had more money than we knew what to do with. As we became incredibly wealthy, a conscious political decision was taken that the state had no more responsibility for contributing to the housing of its people.

Although I’m tempted, I won’t go into the thinking behind that decision — or the consequences that flowed from a policy aimed at enriching as many private developers as possible. When money was cheap, we failed to use it to strengthen our economy and

society, and gave it away to be abused instead.

But that policy drift has become a brick wall. We are raising a generation of children without hope, because we are unwilling or unable to start building local authority houses again.

We have the money, we have the capacity, we have the land. But somehow or other it’s impossible. The Government will apparently do anything, anything at all, except start to build again. Fianna Fáil, according to the weekend papers, want tax breaks for builders

to encourage them to fill the gap (heavens above!). Today’s papers report that the vulture funds are ramping up their efforts to have existing homes repossessed.

And all we’ve heard is two reasons for the failure to build. The first is arrant nonsense — we can’t afford it. Housing is one of those economic investments that produces a financial return from the moment a key is handed to a tenant. The voluntary housing agencies can finance their investments for precisely that reason. A rich economy can do likewise.

The second reason we’re given is fiscal rules. We can’t make the necessary investment, even though we can afford to do it, and even though it’s financially productive, because European rules won’t allow us to increase the deficit.

I don’t believe that the European Commission will punish Ireland for facing up to its responsibility to children who are homeless. If our Government were to announce, tomorrow, that it intends to deploy national resources to start building homes immediately, and that it intends to set a target of (say) 6,000 local authority houses a year for each year of the next decade, the European institutions would work with us to find funding mechanisms to get it done. Because the problem isn’t the money — it’s what the money is called. It’s an entirely technical issue — is it on the balance sheet or not?

The fundamental issue here is political will. We’ve had a summer now of Leo Varadkar enjoying a political honeymoon of sorts. He’s charming, he’s good natured, he’s attractive. He’s even getting to be a bit of an icon. Good for him.

But you know the old saying about the difference between the sizzle and the sausage — it’s the difference between style and substance. It’s time now for Leo Varadkar to show substance in relation to the single most pressing issue of his time. It’s time for him and his government to make it clear that their first priority is building homes. It’s already too late for some, and we’re heading into a winter where a failing policy will generate more tragic casualties.

Nothing less than a sea change will do. We have to build the houses, in their thousands. If necessary we have to change the law and the constitution to enable unused houses and land to be compulsorily acquired. We have to do what governments did in the past and accept that housing is a national responsibility.

If we don’t, we’re writing off a generation of children and young people, and guaranteeing them a future of alienation and hopelessness. Is that what new politics, and the bright young things of this political generation, are going to be remembered for? What a genuine scandal that would be.