On November 18th last year, on the floor of Leinster House, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: "A situation whereby children, in particular, are homeless is not one that anybody can condone."
That month, in Dublin, there were 741 children in 325 families in emergency accommodation; outside Dublin, 146 children in 70 families.
The most recent figures, for June, show 1,122 homeless children in 531 families in Dublin, and 196 children in 89 families around the country.
While the numbers of children in homelessness outside Dublin have fluctuated, they have been increasingly steadily since January, from 85 then, to 135 in February, to 143 in March, 148 in April, 177 in May and 196 in June – a 130 per cent increase in six months.
And as the numbers grow, and families get stuck in emergency accommodation, local authorities are being forced to use hotels and B&Bs to house them.
The use of hotels for emergency accommodation for families has been banned in Scotland. In England their use has been capped at six weeks, after which a family has right to file a complaint with their local authority. Such is the damage this type of accommodation does, particularly to children, when used long-term, British authorities won't allow it.
Councils struggling
Here however, we are shovelling low-income families into single hotel rooms for months at a time, and even over a year in some cases, at an alarming rate as local authorities struggle to cope with numbers of parents and children becoming homeless.
Galway City Council, which last year budgeted €20,000 for emergency accommodation for families this year, is on track to spend 10 times that, while Cork City Council has seen its monthly spend on hotel and B&B accommodation for families increase more than tenfold in a year.
A housing official in one local authority said yesterday they had heard Mike Allen, head of advocacy with Focus Ireland, describe the unfolding family homelessness crisis as "a national emergency".
“While I couldn’t be quoted, well you can take it we would agree with that,” the official said.
Niamh Randall, head of policy with the Simon Communities, said she and colleagues were "seeing things we have never seen in all our time working in housing and homelessness policy. We are seeing things not witnessed since the '80s".
“The situation is now, without a shadow of a doubt, out of control. The time for platitudes about social housing investment and the promise of social housing by 2020 is over. We need emergency actions now,” she said.
Poorer families
The same range of factors that has seen the number of homeless children in Dublin spiral is now pushing poorer families out of their homes across the State.
These are increasing rents, rent allowance caps that don't meet these rents, landlords exiting the Rental Accommodation Scheme, banks repossessing buy-to-lets, and landlords refusing rent allowance.
Housing organisations and campaigners are demanding that the Taoiseach intervene to stem the flow of poorer families into emergency accommodation. They are calling for a rise in rent supplement caps, regulation of rent and legislation to ensure no child sleeps rough.
In short, they are calling on Kenny to show he meant what he said last November, when things were not as “out of control” as they are now.
