Tag: Housing Crisis

If we Tolerate This, Our Children Will be Next

Homeless and hungry bellies on the streets of our capital

The Trauma of Child Homelessness

Brian McLoughlin: In March 2017, then housing minister Simon Coveney officially opened the first family hub in Dublin for families experiencing homelessness. He said this was a response to the negative experiences of homeless families being accommodated in commercial hotels. Coveney then confidently stated that the use of commercial hotels to accommodate homeless families would end in July 2017. 

In Inner City Helping Homeless, we knew this was yet another empty promise that couldn’t possibly be delivered, but Coveney persisted with the publicity tour. When asked by The Journal if he really thought the goal of no longer using hotels for homeless families was achievable, he stuck to his guns that it was possible and that people were working hard to make it happen.

Fast forward four years, and the use of commercial hotels and B&Bs for homeless families continues as more and more hotels pop up around the city. A recent DRHE report stated that in April 2021 there were 113 families still being accommodated in commercial hotels. Families cramped in to one room with their children, their children’s toys, school books – all at a huge cost to the state. While we were all told to stay at home during Covid-19, these families had to spend day after day sharing one room, putting huge mental health pressure on both the children and their parents. It is well documented that living in emergency accommodation impacts a child’s development, creating physical and mental health issues for children in primary school. Homelessness is creating a trauma for a generation of children, and we will be seeing the fallout of this for years to come.

“There’s nothing nice about how I feel” – Charlie, aged 6

In 2019, the Ombudsman for Children brought out a report called No Place Like Home.  For the report, they spoke to children living in emergency accommodation, from small children right up to teenagers. They asked them to explain what life for them was like in their own words, and some of the answers would break a heart made of stone. Children feeling like they were prisoners and were being punished when all they are guilty of is becoming homeless in a country that would rather pay huge money to hotels, B&Bs and family hubs than develop a proper public housing building plan to give these children homes.  When asked what they liked about where they live, the answers spoke for themselves:

“I like nothing about living here, I have none of my friends here, I can’t do a sleep over … [it] makes me feel sad. There’s nothing nice about how I feel”. (Charlie, aged 6)

“It’s like a prison …. It’s just horrible” – Rebecca, aged 10

“The rules are very strict. The worst is that you are not allowed to have friends in your room. They just expect you to sit on your own. And not being allowed to be anywhere without your mam, you’re not even allowed to sit in the room for ten minutes by yourself. I know it has safety issues but nothing is going to happen … If we break the rules we will get kicked out. It’s like a prison … it’s just horrible”. (Rebecca, aged 10)

“Some days I didn’t even want to wake up” – Rachel, aged 10

“Some days I didn’t even want to wake up because I didn’t want to face this day … I am tired in school. Some days I would just sit there and not even smile”. (Rachel, aged 10)

When there are ten-year-old children having suicidal thoughts we as a society are failing these children. Many speak of not being allowed to have visitors or sleep-overs – even prisoners are allowed to have visitors. Why are we allowing this?

 “Children … were struggling to learn to walk in a cramped room”

In 2018, Temple Street Children’s Hospital experienced a big spike in children being released to ‘No Fixed Abode’ and wrote a report on the impact of homelessness on children. The report stated that homeless children are most likely to get sick from their cramped accommodation. The main reasons children presented to Temple Street were burns (kettles in hotel rooms), scabies from dodgy mattresses, injuries from falls, and respiratory issues. Even more shocking is the fact that homeless children were not developing quickly enough: they were struggling to learn to walk in a cramped room and even the development of their swallow was effected due to the food they were having to eat as their parents had no available cooking facilities.  Research shows that homelessness influences every facet of a child’s life, from conception to young adulthood, and that the experience of homelessness inhibits the physical, emotional, cognitive, social and behavioural development of children.

“As of April 2021 there were 167 families, 247 adults and 475 children, who are in emergency accommodation for over two years”

These children are this country’s future generations, and they are being let down over and over again by an incompetent government who lack empathy, compassion and vision. A government which continues to outsource state responsibilities to private developers, vulture funds, commercial hotels, B&Bs and privately-operated hostels. Not only do we have a government who lack empathy and compassion, but they are also economically incompetent. Report after report has highlighted what we are doing to children’s development by keeping them in emergency accommodation. As of April 2021 there were 167 families, 247 adults and 475 children, who are in emergency accommodation for over two years.

And what does family emergency accommodation cost? What is the price the taxpayer pays to put children into these environments that cause so much pain?

Fact: it costs more to accommodate a family in emergency accommodation than in a luxury apartment

The figure for accommodating a family of four in emergency accommodation for a year is a staggering €69,000-€80,000.  To put a family in one room, to put a huge strain on the mental and physical health of both the children and their parents.  For context, American real estate fund Kennedy Wilson are renting out units in Dublin’s Capitol Dock Development, originally marketed as Dublin’s Most Desirable Address. On-site amenities include a concierge service, gym, fitness studio, business lounge, residents’ lounge, chef’s kitchen and a cinema room. Nearly half of these apartments are vacant today, potential homes sitting empty as families struggle through life in emergency accommodation.  And the cost of renting one of these apartments is considerably less than what the taxpayer is paying per family for emergency accommodation. The biggest unit in the Capitol Dock building is a three-bed and the monthly cost is €4,017-€4,410.  This is between €20,000 and €30,000 cheaper annually than putting a homeless family into a hotel or B&B for the year.  Is this acceptable to people?

We owe it to these children to fight for them, to tell the government that we will no longer accept their hyperbole and broken promises. These children deserve a safe and secure home, something stated in the original constitution, and we have gotten further and further away from that in the last ten years. We all need to work together to get a referendum on the Right to Housing, and as Covid restrictions lift we need to see feet on the street for water-charges-level protests to shame the government into immediate action.

As the Manic Street Preachers song says, If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next.

Brian McLoughlin is Head of Communications for Inner City Helping Homeless and one of the four contributors to Unite’s Take Four group blog, along with Conor McCabe, Ber Grogan and Laura Broxson.

A FAIR SOCIETY REQUIRES COMPROMISE

New Blog by Brendan Ogle.
This week we had an emergency debate on a vote of no confidence in the Minister responsible for that emergency, Eoghan Murphy. Just days before we had four by-elections where barely one quarter of the electorate bothered turning up, so four new TD’S took part in the debate. I watched Tuesday’s debate live. Amid all the theatrics and finger pointing this much was clear: the Government believe the free market is the only way to provide housing, even on public land.

IN THIS REGARD IT IS OUR GOVERNMENT WHO ARE ‘EXTREMISTS’

Did you know that 5% of renters pay 75% of their total income to their landlord? This is one, just one, of an extraordinary array of statistics linked to our housing and homeless emergency.

This week we had an emergency debate on a vote of no confidence in the Minister responsible for that emergency, Eoghan Murphy. Just days before we had four by-elections where barely one quarter of the electorate bothered turning up, so four new TD’S took part in the debate. I watched Tuesday’s debate live. Amid all the theatrics and finger pointing this much was clear: the Government believe the free market is the only way to provide housing, even on public land. They are wedded to that ideology, see nothing at all wrong with it, and even think it’s ‘caring’. The Government’s definition of ‘caring’ is best encapsulated by Minister Regina O’Doherty who thinks it is ‘caring’ to refuse to award a 10c increase (yes 10 cents, it’s not a misprint) to our lowest minimum wages workers in a city where apartments costing €300,000 are described by Government as ‘affordable’.

That position is not caring. Rather it is an extremist position lacking in compassion or compromise.

I have just come from the launch of the ‘Jesuit Centre for Faith & Justice (JCFJ)’ strategic plan for 2019-2023. I am not a religious person but I like to think I am a compassionate one, and the Jesuit’s do fantastic work here in the areas of social justice and inequality. They are not extremists. They are realists in social and economic terms. Their plan focuses in on the three key areas of Housing, Climate Action and Penal Reform and their champion is Fr. Peter McVerry. In his address earlier he made reference to the report being a ‘critique without fear of losing Government funding because we don’t get any.’ This was more than just a quip, and everybody present knew it.

Yesterday the Chief Executive of the ‘Peter McVerry Trust’, which does rely on substantial Government funding, made what I still consider to be ill-advised comments about the political debate the previous night, basically saying that changing the Housing Minister would have been pointless. When Apollo House was order to be closed by the High Court in January 2017 the same Trust, and Dublin City Council too, swore affidavits in Court that there were enough beds in Dublin City then for all homeless people. Those oaths looked ridiculous then, and they look even more ridiculous now. They were simply untrue. But what sort of extremist Government requires such unquestioning compliance from emergency service providers like these in order to ensure the provision of essential funding streams for our most vulnerable?

Of course citizens shouldn’t require ‘charity’ or emergency services for a roof over their heads.  That notion in itself is the manifestation of Fine Gaels’ extreme political ideology. Basic decency, fairness and the concept of ‘society’ should be enough. One of this morning’s speakers was JCFJ’S Kevin Hargaden who noted that ‘it has been decades since the wealthy have carried such a light load’ and that it was as a result of this fact that ‘social services have been devastated’. 

Kevin also pointed out what should be obvious but is often lost in the cascade of extremist and divisive Government policies, and the clamour of their apologists in the ideological sect that is Irish media – ‘poverty is not a natural disaster’. Indeed it is not. Everything we see on our streets now, that we witness every day, is the result of a political choice. We are a rich country, a very rich country. Yet our streets are strewn with human suffering, degradation and economic isolation. It’s brutal in its contempt for ordinary people. 

I learned this morning too that 75% of the occupants of our prisons are suffering from addiction, and of course there are only a small number of assistance programmes available. Where they exist they only do so to save Government blushes, as opposed to any sincere effort to stop the anesthesia of those who our Government are content to abandon to the fringes of ‘recovery Ireland’.

EXTREMISM

We now live in a country where those who believe a roof over their heads is a human right and social need, where those who want a living wage, who seek tax justice, who expect a health service that provides services based on need as opposed to wealth are treated as the ‘extremists’. And yet a Government that is presiding over the worst housing emergency since the famine, that allows employment abuses that are so bad some go back to the days of slavery (I have the records and real life testimonies in my office) and which is wilfully stealing our children’s youth and hopes for basic needs to be met in the future claim to be, and are allowed get away with describing themselves as ‘holding the centre’.

No. 

They are not. They are the extremists. They and their bullying, arrogant greed, their selfish pandering to their rich paymasters, their recklessness with our taxes and their non-collection of much more, their sociopathy which is now bordering on psychopathy, and their careless delusion of compassion. The carnage which is now the lived experience of far too many is a result of Government extremism. But enough from me. Peter McVerry, in the best letter I have ever seen printed in The Irish Times, sums up the extremism best:

‘Sir, – I attended court with a young homeless boy who had been charged with theft of a bottle of orange, value $1.

Another homeless man was charged with theft of four bars of chocolate, value €3.

Another homeless man was charged with theft of tow packets of Silk Cut cigarettes.

A TD, on his way to, or from, his full-time, very well paid job in Brussels, stops by at Dail Eireann to sign in, so that he can collect his full €51,600 expenses for his attendance in the Dail. – Yours, etc.

Fr PETER Mc Verry SJ

Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice’