Housing chair who said families ‘gamed the system’ is rehired
HOUSING Minister Eoghan Murphy has reappointed Conor Skehan as chairman of the Housing Agency, despite claims that Mr Skehan made about some families ‘gaming the system’.
Speaking on Newstalk radio last week, he accused people of falsely declaring themselves homeless.
Mr Skehan has served as chairman of the agency since July 2013 and was due leave the position last month, before his reappointment.
During the radio interview, Mr Skehan referred to the shortlived 2015 ministerial direction by then housing minister Alan Kelly, which stated that 50% of social housing in Dublin city and county must be allocated to homeless people. A year after that direction came in, the number of homeless families had more than doubled.
Mr Skehan claimed that this prioritisation, which ended in July 2016, had ‘created a distortion in the waiting list system and may have encouraged people to game the system’.
At the time of Mr Skehan’s remarks, Minister Murphy distanced himself from them, saying he had found no evidence of it in his department.
He said that Mr Skehan ‘advises on Government policy and how he thinks it might be impacting’.
He added: ‘It’s fair enough that he can do that, that is his role. It is not for me to criticise him for doing that. It is important that we have different voices in this debate. Conor was saying that may have been an unintended consequence of previous government policy.’
Mr Skehan was roundly criticised for his comments by homelessness charities.
Fr Peter McVerry said that the group of parents doing this to get a council house was only ‘a tiny, tiny fraction’ of homeless people – and the campaigning priest criticised Mr Skehan for suggesting such scams were more widespread. ‘For a vast majority of families becoming homeless, they are being evicted from the private rental sector. There is no scam there. They are being thrown out,’ he said.
Mr Skehan’s comments are in line with some contained in an unpublished April 2016 Review of the Ministerial Direction on Housing Allocations for Homeless and Other Vulnerable Households.
At the end of the report, the agency recommended that the ministerial direction should lapse upon its final operation date of April 30, 2016, citing ‘incentives’ for households to ‘willingly seek to be reclassified as homeless’ as a key concern.
The Housing Agency said Mr Skehan had been speaking in a personal capacity when he made his comments.
His appointment, for another year, was confirmed in a notice published in State Gazette, Iris Oifigiúil.