I had to look the word up. The dictionary informs me that it relates to a parliamentarian speaking for too long, to disrupt a legislative assembly.

In real life, I’ve decided that it means ‘kicking to touch’.

This week, I found a really good use for the word. A couple of Easters ago, Fr Peter McVerry was asked to reflect on Ireland. “We have lost our sense of outrage,” he said.

He confused me. Do we really need more outrage? There was a journalist who used to say: “People love to be outraged; in fact, they pay for it.” This journalist believed that outrage would sell papers. You needn’t spend too long on Twitter or Facebook to see where they were coming from. All this fighting and cyber-shouting and blowing-off of steam, but to what end? To be honest, I couldn’t see where Fr McVerry was coming from.

But, last Thursday morning, I finally caught up with his thinking, understood what he meant. I had gotten up at 4.30am and, as the kettle boiled, I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed, in search of connection and community at that early hour.

A photo of several young children caught my eye. They were curled up asleep, on rows of chairs; chairs bolted to the ground, in some kind of a waiting room. The floor was covered in linoleum tiles. There were five children in the photo, all sleeping in the foetal position.

They were in a garda station, in Tallaght. Their mum had looked for emergency accommodation earlier that night, but none was available and so they were referred to a garda station. The caption under the photo said that up to eight other families had been referred to garda stations the same night.

I had two thoughts: Firstly, this image needs to be verified. It could easily be fake. My second thought was: “If this is indeed real, I hope this is the tipping point of outrage, where Irish people say ‘enough is enough’.”

By lunchtime, the image was being widely reported and outrage was in full flight. Outrage and anger, constructive as opposed to retributive, are a tremendous spark for action and change.

After all, when it comes to housing and homelessness and rents and mortgage arrears and week-long queues at new housing developments, there has been more than enough filibustering.

In the last four years, we’ve had three different housing ministers. We had Labour’s Alan Kelly, followed by Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney, who was replaced by his party colleague, Eoghan Murphy.

In November, 2015, Kelly promised a tenfold rise in social-housing builds by the end of that year. Little materialised in bricks and mortar, but there were summits and bullet-pointed action plans.

When Coveney stepped into the frame, there was the launch of Rebuilding Ireland. All these houses were promised. It would all be sorted by 2020. He looked earnest at the press conference.

There was a scent of hope in the air, but not for long.

Apollo House appeared at Christmas 2016. Would the battering ram of an occupied building be the fulcrum on which this crisis would finally turn? By Christmas 2017, little had changed, save for a steady increase in homelessness figures.

When Eoghan Murphy took over the mantle in June 2017, with his rolled-up sleeves á la Barack Obama, the scent of hope had returned.

Just three months into the job, he held a housing summit with the chief executives of all the local authorities. He was confronted by housing activist Anthony Flynn on his way into the grand meeting. The cameras were rolling.

“I’m working on this every day. It is the top priority for the Government and you need to understand that,” he told Flynn.

Flynn has spent the last five or so years going out to feed the homeless in the capital, pretty much every night. Flynn told him that the reason local authorities weren’t building houses was because the Government wouldn’t give them the cash to do so.

“There’s not a problem with funding at all,” countered Mr Murphy. “This time, we’re going to build four times as many social houses as we built in 2015. We have more money to reprioritise that into social housing.”

As the one-year anniversary of that exchange approaches, we now have almost 10,000 people homeless in Ireland, 3,826 of whom are children. And let’s not make this just about those of no fixed abode. There are couples living at home with mum and dad. There are single people, with pensionable jobs, who can’t afford to buy on their own. And there are growing families who could do with two extra bedrooms in their one-bed Celtic Tiger apartments. All these ministers and summits and promises and all we get are rising rents and rising homelessness.

The public has been outraged before. The public has galvanised before. But it gets tiring when the numbers keep rising and the crisis keeps deepening. We get jaundiced, and outrage is hard to come by when there’s this much filibustering.

So, what is it going to take? Will this photo be our tipping point? Will these sleeping children awaken our sense of outrage? And will this outrage be powerful enough to bulldoze through filibustering to pave a way for real change?

In politics, they say there are no votes in homelessness. Perhaps not, but there are votes for those with track records in humanity, pragmatism, and action.