As a young man, my friend Peter O’Callaghan, who has died aged 82, had his heart set on being a priest, but after five years in a seminary decided it was not his calling and instead dedicated his life to helping homeless people.
From the late 1960s, as head of the emergency department of the pioneering housing charity Shac (the London Housing Aid Centre), directed by Father Paul Byrne, Peter was at the heart of the new housing aid movement, undertaking detailed casework and building bridges between radical campaigns, housing charities and progressive councils who wanted to tackle homelessness and bad conditions in the private rented sector.
