Greg DalyWhile the media spotlight has dimmed, homelessness remains a bitter reality in modern Ireland, writes Greg Daly
This month’s opening of Merchant’s Quay’s new Night Café for homeless people is in the best tradition of the Franciscan founders of Merchants Quay Ireland, according to Tony Geoghegan, CEO of MQI.
“When the Franciscans set up their tea rooms in 1966-67, they focused on the most marginalised”, he told The Irish Catholic, explaining how the new Night Café maintains this concentration, offering light meals, tea and coffee, showers, and information and advice to the most vulnerable of Dublin’s homeless.
“People who end up in entrenched homelessness, sleeping rough, tend to be people with more complex needs,” says Mr Geoghegan, explaining. “They often have mental health issues, or problems with addiction, which are compounding factors in homelessness.”
Saying he is “very pleased” with the Night Café’s opening, he points out that while more emergency beds have become available in Dublin since early December, “people with more complex issues are often intimidated in dealing with new arrangements”.
Much emergency accommodation is dormitory-style, he says, explaining that large rooms full of bunk beds can be “quite intimidating” for people with complex problems.
Dormitories
While such dormitories may be intimidating, they are clearly needed – on November 11, 2014 the Dublin Region Homeless Executive found that 168 people were sleeping on the city’s streets, the highest number of rough sleepers in five years.
The Night Café, Mr Geoghegan says, should be a “safe space” where such people can come in and get somewhere secure for the evening.
Part of the challenge in placing such people, he says, is finding the kind of accommodation that best fits their needs. Their social skills may not be the best but there is also the issue that “in placing people in emergency accommodation, you don’t want to place people who’ve just come off detox in a place where everyone is drinking, or likewise to place someone who is recently drug-free into an environment where they’re surrounded by active drug users.”
Describing the café’s first night as a “big success” in which 35 people came along without there being any “major incidents”, he says the main thing MQI is trying to do is “to have an open door policy with a threshold as low as possible, hoping to accommodate the most marginalised”.
He explains how the café takes referrals from the Gardaí and hospitals and liaises with the Central Placement Unit, which allocates emergency beds or refers people to the Night Café when they call its freephone number.
Such coordination is important, he says, because “the last thing we want is for people to be given emergency accommodation and come to the café instead, letting their bed go to waste”.
Ireland’s homelessness crisis goes far beyond Dublin’s rough sleepers, however. In 1992, the Council of Europe defined the homeless as “persons or families that are socially excluded from permanently occupying a personal and adequate home”, and Roughan MacNamara, advocacy manager at Focus Ireland, says Focus Ireland estimates that there are “up to 5,000 homeless people in Ireland at any one time”.
He says the pattern of Irish homelessness is changing, and Francis Doherty, Communications and Advocacy Manager of the Peter McVerry Trust, agrees, saying that whereas traditionally the trust worked primarily with people with a history of mental health and drug misuse issues, over the last 18 to 24 months the trust has seen a shift from what he says might be called “traditional homelessness” to the “new homeless”.
“Families and others have become homeless because of the country’s economic collapse,” he says, “with the rising costs of living in private rented accommodation and repossessions of family homes forcing people into homelessness.”
Focus Ireland is the main organisation working with such families in Dublin, and Mr MacNamara agrees that their reasons for homelessness are often strikingly different from those in more ‘traditional’ homeless cases. “What we’re finding,” he says, “is that there are a lot of families – and single people too – who are becoming homeless purely for economic reasons, whereas before people became homeless after, for instance, leaving state care, or following illnesses or relationship breakdowns.”
“Last year saw 40 to 50 families becoming homeless each month in Dublin alone,” he says, explaining how this is mainly due to rising rents coupled with rent subsidies lagging behind changing market realities.
Mr MacNamara says this should be easy to address, given the lack of other problems, but “because it’s not being addressed quickly enough parents and children get entrenched in their situations and other problems develop”.
Families who have registered as homeless are often placed in hotel rooms due to a lack of proper accommodation, he says, describing parents and children confined together in rooms where parents cannot cook and children cannot play.
It is hardly surprising that this can lead to stress and depression among adults, while children suffer in terms of confidence, general wellbeing, and development, he says. Living in such “stressful and insecure environments”, he adds, can have effects on diet and health, and can also affect education, as families might have to take places outside school catchment areas, forcing children to travel long distances.
He stresses that the situation is “not totally negative”, and that it has been possible to move some families to more sustainable and secure accommodation, but insists that “we need to move them all”.
Tony Geoghegan says there has been a “huge blockage” for homeless people in recent years due to the unavailability not merely of emergency accommodation, but of move-on options. “The private rented sector has been the traditional route out,” he explains, adding that “in the past more than 50% of those moving on did so to private rented accommodation”, but this has gone because of rent rises, cutbacks in rent allowances, and a reluctance among private landlords to take on people on social welfare.
The effect of this, he says, is that “emergency accommodation has been clogged up over the past five years”, with some people having been on it for three years and more.
Attempting to address this, the Peter McVerry Trust has been working with Focus Ireland in a joint project, Housing First, that helps rough sleepers to move directly from the street to apartments with a range of supports so they can sustain their tenancy.
Currently the project has 130 apartments across the city, with Mr Doherty saying “every option is being explored” to secure and develop more such accommodation.
Despite the situation, Tony Geoghegan is hopeful, saying that “there’s been a tremendous public response, and as a result a political response, due to tragic deaths in December that highlighted the level of homelessness in Ireland and the need to address the problem.”
Objectives
Overall, he says he is “pleased” with the Government’s 20-point plan for dealing with homelessness, which he believes addresses “longer and medium term strategic objectives” as well as “the need for emergency accommodation”.
The Government has recognised that “the State can’t rely wholly on private landlords to solve the problem, and that social housing will need to be built,” he says, stressing that “ultimately a housing plan is the answer”.
Of course, while he reiterates that he is “very supportive of the plan”, he points out that it remains to be seen how it will be delivered on. “That,” he says, “is what’s most important.”
While Fr McVerry had been sceptical of the plan when it was announced, describing as “Alice and Wonderland politics” the commitment to end homelessness in Ireland by 2016, Mr Doherty says the reality is that “neither government nor charities can tackle issues without a strategic plan”, making the plan “essential.” He agrees its targets are “ambitious”, but says this makes it all the more important that pressure is put on government to make sure the targets are met as soon as possible, saying: “We can’t leave people languishing in hotels and homeless accommodation.”
Mr MacNamara welcomes the Government’s willingness to address this issue, and its allocation of €2.2billion for social housing, but expresses concern that the first of the planned houses won’t be available for at least 18 months.
Stressing the need for urgent short-term action, he says while homelessness was in the media spotlight at Christmas, “it is vital that the urgency needed to tackle these serious problems is in place this year”.
It is crucial, he adds, that the Government follows through on its commitments and takes action to improve access to private rented accommodation for people who are homeless or at risk. He says that preventing people from falling into homelessness makes not merely “moral sense” but “economic sense”.
“For the sake of a relatively small amount, it saves long term cost,” he says, explaining that preventing homelessness would keep families stable and secure, warding off further problems and expenses down the line.
Challenging the view that the Government can’t raise rent subsidies because of wider effects, he says we should look to how these issues are addressed in countries like Germany, where people can find affordable homes in the private sector.
He says the cliché that Irish people have “an obsession with owning property” is a “nice soundbite”, but simply reflects the fact that people don’t want to live in private renting situations where they lack security. Suggesting that the answer may lie in changes to how landlords’ incomes are taxed, he is adamant that “any solution will need to work for landlords,” because people can’t be expected to rent their property at a loss.
Above all, says Mr Doherty: “We need to stop the flow of people into homelessness.” Sayinghow the repossession of family homes needs to be stopped along with the introduction of rent caps and realistic increases in rent subsidy levels, he says: “We need to stop the situation where people are evicted into homelessness.”
Prevention is the key, he says. “Prevention gives us a breathing space to get people who are homeless into their own accommodation. If we keep having six people every day presenting as homeless we will always need shelters and that’s just not acceptable.”