Greg Daly
Tackling homelessness must be a priority in Ireland’s new programme for government, leading campaigners have warned.
The calls come after 134 families became homeless last month, bringing Ireland’s total number of homeless families to 769. Previously, the highest monthly total for newly homeless families had been 84 in August last year. The comparable figure for January 2015 was 54.
While no political party seriously engaged with the homeless crisis during the election campaign, according to Mike Allen, Director of Advocacy at Focus Ireland, neither was the issue wholly disregarded. “Nobody was ignoring homelessness, so it should be possible to piece together a very credible response to homelessness,” he told The Irish Catholic, continuing, “it’s essential – it should be a top priority in the programme for government with real political weight behind it”.
Fr Peter McVerry, calling housing “the key social justice issue facing our country right now” said homelessness is simply “the most extreme manifestation of the crisis”. He called for “the outlining and resourcing of an ambitious housing programme” to be central to negotiations for the next programme for government.
“We’re heading into the fourth year of rising homelessness, and the pattern is very similar each year,” Mr Allen said. “There’s usually a dip in November and December where people who are effectively homeless are not entering homeless services because it’s Christmas,” he continued, explaining that the January figures partly reflect this “pent up homelessness”. After January, he said, the figure “always drops back a bit, but to a higher level than before. If the future is going to be like the past we’re going to see a new average which would be higher”.
The irony of the situation, he said, is that January had been “probably the best month for supported exits from homelessness”, but the crisis in the private rented sector has reached a point where such support can’t keep up.
Although 125 of the families are newly homeless, he said, nine were families who had slipped back into homelessness. “Families are desperately trying to avoid homelessness and desperately trying to get out of it,” he said, and in doing so were so desperate that they were sometimes forced into solutions that “don’t necessarily work out”.