The number of homeless people has reached yet another record, of 14,429, including over 4,000 children in over 2,000 families last month.
The latest data, published on Friday by the Department of Housing, also show the number of homeless adults surpassed 10,000 for the first time while the number of children decreased by three.
The figures say that during the week of July 22nd to 28th there were 10,028 adults and 4,401 children in emergency accommodation. There were 2,086 families accessing homelessness shelter. In addition, there were 6,573 single adults.
These compare with 14,303 people in emergency accommodation in June, including 9,899 adults and 4,404 children.
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The latest numbers represent a 12.3 per cent increase in the 12 months since July last year, when there were 12,847 people in emergency accommodation including 9,018 adults and 3,829 children.
None of this data includes homeless people who are in domestic refuges, those in direct provision centres who have leave to remain in the State, those who are sleeping rough, or the 2,539 male asylum seekers awaiting offers of accommodation.
The highest numbers of homeless are in Dublin, where last month there were 10,487 people in emergency accommodation, including 3,289 children in 1,488 families. There were 4,634 single adult in emergency accommodation.
The total in the capital is a 10.5 per cent increase on the 9,484 total in July 2023.
Catherine Kenny, chief executive of Dublin Simon, said as winter approached “the urgency of addressing the homeless crisis becomes even more pressing”. She continued: “An exponential increase in the development of new social housing ... must be at the forefront of any Budget discussions.”
Focus Ireland’s chief executive Pat Dennigan said it was a “harsh reality” that “thousands of kids have just started a new school year coming from emergency accommodation’'.
It was “wrong” that this should be happening, he added. “As a society we must demand that much more is done to protect children whose childhoods are being stolen one day at a time.” They needed homes, not longer and longer stays in emergency accommodation.
He said family homelessness was continuing to rise mainly because families were finding it “harder than ever to secure a home and move out of homelessness”. Almost half of all homeless families had been in homelessness for more than a year, he said, and over 400 of these for more than two years.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik described as “utterly heartbreaking” that thousands of children were “heading back to school” from emergency shelter.
“These are not just numbers; these are young lives being shaped by an environment of uncertainty and instability ... Years of economic prosperity have been squandered by successive governments that have failed to address what is undoubtedly the issue of our time ... It is now almost three years since the Government’s ‘Housing for All’ plan was launched, and it has failed on every metric. House prices are up, homelessness is up, and evictions are up. The Government’s housing policy has failed miserably.”
Cian O’Callaghan TD, Social Democrats spokesman on housing, said the figures showed the “devastating consequences of this Government’s housing failures”.
“There are solutions that would help ease this crisis if they were implemented properly. The cumbersome four-stage approval process that is holding back local authorities from building social housing needs to be scrapped. In addition, Housing First tenancies must be ramped up. No fault evictions, which are pushing families into homelessness, also need to be stopped.
“A new housing plan is urgently needed. The end of the road cannot come soon enough for this Government,” said deputy O’Callaghan.
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