Consciences of goldfish - Village Magazine

38 February 2015

Consciences of goldsh

Increase emergency beds, keep rents down and generate

sustainable homes by allocating 50% of social houses to

homeless households. By Mike Allen

PERSON who is homeless

can expect to live only until

his or her mid-forties. Each

year around 30 people who

are homeless die in our cap-

ital city; most in emergency shelters,

a few on the streets. You never hear of

them. Their deaths get as little atten-

tion as their lives, unless they die in some

manner which is suﬃciently gruesome

to be newsworthy, such as by drinking

hand-cleaner or being crushed to death

in a rubbish bin.

Jonathan Corrie’s death within sight of

the Dáil last December received a level of

coverage usually reserved for the deaths

of national ﬁgures or celebrities. For

years the people of Dublin walked past

Jonathan Corrie with few giving him a

moment’s thought. Now we needed to

hear almost everything about his life: his

terrible addiction to drugs, his upbring-

ing, his relationships, the feelings of his

children.

Within 24 hours of Jonathan’s death

the Catholic bishops called for a ‘Summit

on Homelessness’. Labour Minister for

the Environment, Alan Kelly and the

Lord Mayor of Dublin, veteran leftist rad-

ical, Christy Burke sought to be the ﬁrst

to respond to the bishops’ call. Within

ten days Minister Kelly announced a ‘20

point action plan’ to tackle the problem of

rough sleeping in Dublin. Kelly declared,

after ﬁve years of cuts in homeless and

health services, that money was not

going to be a problem.

You want to clap and cheer. At last

the scandal of homelessness has come

to public attention and political will has

heard the public concern and turned it

into action. We are a good people and

Kelly’s is the sort of determined and

immediate response we want from our

politicians.

On the 9th of January this year a home-

less man was found dead in Temple Bar.

There were news reports but, by the

following day when his identity was

conﬁrmed, everyone had lost interest.

For the record, he was Vytas Virzintas,

a 54-year-old Lithuanian. In the sec-

ond week of January, the Department of

Environment posted a progress report on

its 20-point plan on its web-site. There

was little interest.

Now you want to put your head in your

hands and sigh. We are the goldﬁsh of

social conscience.

Poverty is a profound problem in our

society, but perhaps the least acknowl-

edged aspect of the problem is that

it is rarely simple and often hard to

comprehend. One of the remarkable con-

sequences of Jonathan’s death was that,

for a brief period, it was possible to talk

about these complexities. People wanted

to understand what had happened, to

hear about the messy human reality of

homelessness – and about the fact that

there are solutions and things we could

do to prevent it.

Jonathan Corrie died because he

had nowhere to sleep? No. He had been

oﬀered a bed that night but did not take

it up. Jonathan slept on the street by

choice? No. He felt unsafe in a lot of the

emergency hostels, though he was actu-

ally OK with the one he was oﬀered that

night. There are almost 2,000 homeless

people in Dublin sleeping rough every

night? No, actually most people who are

homeless are in emergency accommoda-

tion. Rough sleeping is the most visible

face of homelessness but numbers vary

between 100-200. Isn’t homelessness

caused by poverty? Well not always.

Jonathan didn’t have a deprived upbring-

ing. Is it about not having a home?

Sorry again, Jonathan seems to have

been bought a home on two occasions.

Extreme poverty and homelessness are

the outcome of all the myriad things that

can go wrong in a life and with the net-

work of family, friends, State services

or a voluntary organisations which we

all need.

Jonathan’s childhood friend Luke

Murphy said it best: “There are no simple

lessons or easy political points to make

from his life or death. He was brought up

with love and discipline, his family never

gave up trying to help him”.

POLITICS HOUSING

The most

signiﬁcant

weakness of

the action plan

is the failure

to address

the crisis of

rapidly rising

private rents

“

February 2015 39

So did the unique circumstances of

Jonathan Corrie’s death make a diﬀer-

ence? Did the complexities of his story

help Government to avoid knee-jerk

reactions?

The centrepiece of the 20-point plan is

a commitment that ‘by Christmas’ there

should be enough emergency beds avail-

able so that no-one should be forced to

sleep on the street for want of a bed. This

is a good commitment. All homeless

services had been telling the authorities

for months that there were not enough

beds for the people who needed them. On

November 11th, the oﬃcial ‘rough sleep-

ing count’ identiﬁed 168 people sleeping

rough. That cold, rainy night virtually all

of the more than 1,700 emergency beds

in the city were full.

Kelly’s plan committed to 260 new

emergency beds being available and by

Christmas the Catholic Church, Civil

Defence and voluntary organisations had

exceeded this and provided a total of 271

new beds. As a result, although around

15 people slept rough over Christmas

there were more than 15 empty beds in

the system. No one slept rough for want

of a bed.

But by the second week of January, the

joint Focus Ireland/Peter McVerry Trust

street team estimated almost 50 people

were sleeping rough with no beds avail-

able for them. This is partly because the

problem of homelessness is growing,

but also because the ‘hidden homeless’

(people in precarious situations, such as

squats) take the opportunity of decent

beds being available to move into the

mainstream system.

This highlights that, while we must

provide enough emergency beds for

everyone who needs them, more and

more emergency beds is not the answer.

Throughout the world, cities that respond

to a public outcry about homelessness

only by providing more emergency beds

ﬁnd that, when the public attention

moves on, the city is left with a perma-

nently higher number of emergency beds

and the same rough-sleeping problem. In

this way many US cities have homeless

hostels holding thousands of destitute

men and women with no hope.

While there are many routes into

homelessness, every route out of home-

lessness requires the provision of a

home. In many cases a variety of sup-

ports is also necessary.

Without the possibility of a home,

people who are homeless end up being

supported in their destitution, accli-

matising to a way of life in which their

fundamental humanity is undermined.

That is why, Actions 6, 8 and 9 in Kelly’s

plan are so important, because they pro-

vide homes.

Action 6 commits to oﬀer 50% of

all social houses which get allocated to

homeless households. In previous years

the allocations to homeless households

varied between 5% and 20%. This

action will make a signiﬁcant diﬀerence

to the chance of someone moving out of

homelessness. The other actions make

derelict housing units available, also cre-

ating potential new homes.

Some of Kelly’s housing measures are

problematic and raise the question of

when a housing unit is not a home. For

instance, recent proposals to put home-

less families into the units in O’Devaney

Gardens, which were vacated several

years ago to allow the regeneration of

the estate, would put families who are

already very vulnerable into even greater

risk.

The most signiﬁcant weakness of the

action plan is the failure to address the

crisis of rapidly rising private rents.

Over 20% of Irish households now live

in private rented accommodation, with

only 10% living in social housing. While

private tenants have certain rights and

security, there is no limit to the annual

rent increase their landlord can demand.

Hundreds of households have found that

rights of tenure are meaningless when

you can no longer pay the rent.

The problems are even greater for

the 70,000 low-income households

dependent on Rent Supplement (RS).

For over two years Joan Burton, Minister

for Social Protection, has refused to

increase RS levels to match rents that

have risen by up to 20%. This has con-

tributed to around 40 families a month

losing their homes, along with countless

single people. The failure to address this

issue either through rent regulation or

increased RS may yet undermine the pos-

itive commitments in Kelly’s plan. There

is also silence in the plan on distressed

owner-occupier mortgages.

At the start of April, the annual ‘Cold

Weather Initiative’ will come to an end.

Dozens of emergency beds temporarily

provided by the civil defence and others

will be closed down.

If Kelly’s housing measures have not

by then allowed signiﬁcant numbers

of people to move out of homelessness

into their own homes, or if unaddressed

rent inﬂation or the banks assault on dis-

tressed homeowners continue to drive

increased numbers into homelessness,

Dublin’s night-time streets will again ﬁll

with citizens with no place to shelter.

We need the public to have the atten-

tion span which the media and the

political system lack. Kelly’s action plan

promised both emergency beds and long-

er-term structural solutions. We need to

welcome the delivery of the emergency

beds but keep up the vigilence needed to

ensure that the deeper solutions – sus-

tainable homes, aﬀordable rents – are

also delivered. So when those emer-

gency beds close in April it is not because

because we have returned to accepting

rough sleeping as normal, but because

people now have their own homes. •

Mike Allen is Director of Advocacy with

Focus Ireland

inhale,

“homelessness”,

exhale, “what was it?”