On this episode of the tip-off, something different, I want to talk through one of my investigations.

I just brought out my first book, No Fixed Abode, is in bookshops and online stores now.

It charts an investigation that has come to consume my life for the past three years,

and it all started in the depths of winter with a simple question. I'm Maeve McLenigan. This is the tip-off.

In early 2018, I was haunted.

The weather was freezing and I kept spotting stories about people dying, dying on the streets.

Each article in a local paper read the same, a brief description of the tragic circumstances around the death, voices raised in outrage,

cries of despair. But there was no discussion about why things were happening, and no linking

up of the stories. Now, I wasn't reading all of these news stories in a vacuum. Each day on my walk to work,

I would pass more and more people sleeping in tents in the centre of the city. I knew homelessness

had shot up in recent years. Rough sleeping was up 169% in the eight years previous to that.

So, if more people were living homeless, I wondered if more people were dying while homeless too. That question started me on a slew of phone calls,

in the hunt for this fairly simple data set. Who was collating deaths of homeless people?

I tried calling the police.

No, they said, but try the hospitals.

The hospital press officer suggested the coroner's office.

They said try the council.

Who pushed me to the government?

Who said try the councils? Weeks me to the government, who said try the councils.

Weeks passed, and it dawned on me.

No one had the figures, because no one knew.

No one was counting.

...