Over a third of local authorities have no plan to tackle homelessness, one year after they were told to get one by the Government, a study by the Simon Community has found. It also says other Government commitments on addressing homelessness "have been ignored by local authorities".
In May last year, each local authority was mandated by the Department of the Environment and Local Government to have a Homeless Action Plan in place by December 2000. Fourteen out of 31 still do not have one. The mandate was announced in its Homelessness: An Integrated Strategy, published in May 2000. It also called on local authorities to "provide a certain proportion of their lettings of existing or new suitable housing units to allow hostel residents to move on". Just Louth and Meath County Councils have made a commitment to do so, the Simon Community study found. The findings show recent hopes that the Government was making a genuine commitment to ending homelessness "have proved to be false", said Mr Conor Hickey, director of the Simon Communities in Ireland.
Among the local authorities who have not published a homeless action plan are Cork County Council, Donegal County Council, Longford County Council and Galway Corporation. The one of most concern to Simon, said a spokesman, was Galway Corporation, given that it has responsibility for an urban setting, which is more likely to have a large homeless population.
However, although its plan has not been finalised, the corporation's director of services in housing, Mr Ciarβn Hayes, said his staff had been involved in a huge amount of work to address the homelessness issue.
Over the past two years, he said, a seven-bed high-support resettlement hostel had been opened on Dyke Road; six houses had been sourced for the Galway Simon Community to provide "move-on" transitional accommodation; a 14-bed hostel for single homeless women had been opened in Salthill and an out-of-hours service to source emergency accommodation had opened near the railway station in the city centre.
Mr Hayes said the plan was being finalised and he would "prefer to get it right rather than have a bad plan on time for the sake of it".
A spokesman for the Department of the Environment said while he would prefer all local authorities "progressed their plans with greater urgency", there were no sanctions the Department could use against them.
A spokesman for the Simon Communities, however, said the issue needed more leadership from Government.
