Open letter to the Taoiseach - Village Magazine

September/October 2015 37

9-12 High Street

Dublin 8

Dear Taoiseach,

Last month, you were asked about a family with three children who narrowly avoided having to sleep rough on a bench in Mountjoy

Square. You responded that “resources were not the problem” in addressing Ireland’s family homelessness crisis. Since then I have been

talking to our front-line staﬀ about whether this reﬂects their experience or the experience of the families they meet every day. I want to

share those reﬂections with you.

For over three years now Focus Ireland has been warning that the problem of family homelessness was escalating at an alarming rate.

If, say, € million had been invested in social housing then, what a diﬀerence it would now be making! Month on month over those

three years the situation has become worse and worse.

When Focus Ireland, with local authority support, set up its ‘Family Homelessness New Presenters Team’ in , there were  fami-

lies becoming homeless each month. The number has doubled every twelve months. In July this year,  families became homeless, 

of them for the ﬁrst time.

Your Government, as part of its commitment to Housing First, funds through the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE), a

street ‘Intake’ team, run jointly by Focus Ireland and Peter McVerry Trust. During July alone this team intervened, late at night, to

ensure that  families did not have to sleep rough. Only one of those cases got media attention, but all those children will remember

that evening for the rest of their lives.

At regular intervals over that time, we have proposed speciﬁc and practical measures which would help stem the ﬂow into homeless-

ness: rent controls, rent supplement levels that reﬂect real market rents, measures to protect the tenancies where a buy-to-let is

repossessed, tax reliefs for landlords, better cross-agency co-ordination, greater urgency on the social housing building programme,

and so on. Most of these proposals have featured in ‘action lists’ from Ministers, but few of them have turned into action.

People want to know, if lack of resources was not the reason you ignored our warnings, what was the reason? It might be useful to let

you know what the situation looks like to one mother, Louise who has two children. She has just lost her home because her landlord’s

property was repossessed by his bank and they want to sell the house. She was paying her rent, a good bit more than the Rent Supple-

ment people were willing to give her. As a result of stretching her income too far, she has no savings to pay a deposit and months rent in

advance. She can’t ﬁnd anywhere else to live.

She brings her two children down to the one-stop shop in Parkgate Street. There they sit and wait to meet an oﬃcial who will assess

her claim to be homeless. She and other families share the crowded waiting area with other desperate people who have active drug and

mental health problems and whose behavior is erratic and upsetting for her children. There are no facilities for children. She has noth-

ing against the people with drug addictions, but wants to protect her young children from this side of life.

Eventually she gets to meet an oﬃcial and makes her case. Her circumstances are clear cut and she has the paperwork to show what

happened. They assess her as being ‘homeless’ and accept that she and her children have nowhere to stay tonight. The oﬃcial tells her

that the local authority will pay for a hotel room but she has to ﬁnd it herself. They call it ‘self-accommodation’.

It can take several hours of phone calls to hotels to secure a room for the family, and, with many other individuals and families still

waiting in the queue to be assessed, the DRHE oﬃcial explains she does not have that time. Louise is tired, fearful, and vulnerable. She

has no experience booking hotel rooms. But now she has to ﬁnd her own room for the night, while she is grateful that DRHE will pay for

it.

Surely, if ‘resources were no problem’, the Government would have made sure that there was emergency accommodation for her and

her family? They would have block-rented rooms. What about those NAMA hotels? Surely if there was enough resources the hard

pressed DRHE oﬃcial would have had time to ensure Louise had a room before she was back out on the street. Surely, if resources were

no problem, someone would have arranged a decent space with a few phones in it, and a place for the children to play, where she could go

and ring the hotels. If it was not a matter of ‘resources’ would the DRHE oﬃcial really just tell her to look after herself?

Louise is back out on the street then, calling hotels from her mobile while she tries to keep her children from crying. Now they need to

be fed. She heads down to the Focus Ireland Coﬀee Shop where the staﬀ will give her the use of a phone or make the calls themselves if

they have the time.

You remember the Coﬀee Shop, Taoiseach? You came down there three years ago and commented on the good work we were doing.

Yours sincerely,

Mike Allen

Director of Advocacy

Focus Ireland

Resources are the problem; and political will, and the delays associated with borrowing.

Open letter to the Taoiseach

POLITICS Homelessness