[3] He first worked in Ballymun and the North Inner City during the 1970s when he found young homeless people in the streets.
We started working with young people and opened a youth club and a craft centre and then I came across a kid sleeping on the street aged nine-years-old ... We decided we better add a hostel to the services we were already running for young people so we opened a small hostel down in the inner city for six boys, as it was all boys then, there were no girls on the streets in the 1970s.The trust grew from one flat over the years, to include eleven homeless hostels, over 100 apartments, a residential drug detox centre and two drug stabilisation services.
[citation needed] The homeless in Ireland are not a problem, they are simply people who have come upon difficult times and circumstances.In 2013, the charity worked with almost 3,600 vulnerable youths.
[11] The Peter McVerry Trust (known previously as The Arrupe Society) was founded in 1983 as a charity to reduce homelessness in Ireland.
[13] In 2023, the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority (AHBRA) appointed inspectors from Mazars to carry out a review of the financing and governance at the charity.
[14][15] Father Peter McVerry features on RTE tv in 1990 discussing the inadequacies of facilities for homeless boys in Ballymun