Three new emergency shelters for homeless people will open in Dublin in the coming weeks, Minister for Housing Simon Coveney has said.
Speaking at the publication of a strategic plan for the homelessness charity, the Peter McVerry Trust, Mr Coveney said the shelters would provide 220 additional emergency beds in the city centre.
This will bring the number of beds for homeless adults, without children, in the capital to more than 1,800.
In August there were 1,388 adults with 2,012 children homeless in Dublin, in addition to 1,584 adults without children.
“The immediacy of the problem we face today requires an increase an emergency bed numbers in Dublin,” said Mr Coveney. “In many ways the fact that that is needed is a statement in itself and the more lasting solutions [to homelessness] are housing-based.”
He said he did not want to see more and more emergency beds opening. “If we continue to increase emergency beds, we are failing.”
The Peter McVerry Trust plans to double its housing provision between now and 2020, to 450 units, enabling it to scale up its capacity to provide the Housing First project, which it does along with Focus Ireland.
Housing First has a capacity of 100 units but under the Government's Rebuilding Ireland plan to address the housing and homelessness crises, it is to increase to 300 units by 2021.
Complex needs
Housing First places rough-sleepers with complex needs straight into housing with a “wrap around” of supports, such as psychiatric, medical and addiction services. The approach of placing people in housing first, and by-passing the steps of emergency and hostel accommodation, has been effective in keeping former rough-sleepers in homes.
The trust will focus particularly on young people leaving care as well as people leaving prison.
Commenting on Rebuilding Ireland, Fr McVerry said there was a lot more in it than plans by previous governments but there was still a "huge reliance on the private rented sector to provide social housing".
Over reliance on the sector had been “a major contributor to the crisis that we are in today”.
“If using the private sector has been a cause of where we are today I fail to see how it can be part of the solution. The only direction that we can go to solve the problem of homelessness is social housing – housing that is under the control of either the local authority or some housing body,” he said.
