HOMELESS MOTHER BRINGS STILLBORN TWINS TO HOSPITAL
Distraught woman gave birth in her emergency accommodation
A DISTRAUGHT homeless mother carried two stillborn twins into a Dublin hospital after giving birth in her emergency accommodation, it has emerged.
The woman arrived at the Rotunda with her dead twin boys after she went into labour last Saturday week in a south Dublin hotel.
Last night, homelessness campaigner Fr Peter McVerry said the family’s circumstances were possibly a contributory factor in the tragedy and called for them to be housed immediately.
He said: ‘We can’t link the deaths to their living situation, but it was possibly a contributory factor. For a family living
in emergency accommodation, it is very stressful and distressful. To have a tragedy like this, it compounds their distress. It’s intolerable. This family on compassionate grounds should be given a council house.’
The mother of three, who is married to an Eastern European man, has been living in emergency accommodation for a year. A Garda investigation was launched on the back of the incident.
Medical tests established the twins had been born two months premature and stillborn a short time before she arrived at the hospital.
‘The two babies never took a breath. This family are completely devastated,’ a source said. ‘It is obviously not ideal for any family to be living in a hotel and they have been there for a year. It is of course particularly sad that she went into labour in a hotel setting.’
Security sources say there are ‘no issues’ within the family unit and that ‘what happened was a terrible tragedy’.
It’s understood the woman presented to the hospital with her husband and dead babies last Saturday week in a ‘highly distraught state’ after going into sudden labour at her hotel accommodation.
According to the latest homelessness figures, 9,527 people, including almost 3,700 children, were temporarily living in hotels and B&Bs in August. This includes 1,698 families, an increase of 18% since August 2017 when the figure was 1,442.
A number of charities hit out at Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy on Thursday after it emerged his department removed 1,606 people from its official homeless figures this year following three ‘re-cate- gorisations’. The department said it originally uncovered the ‘errors’ during discussions with a number of local authorities as they were compiling February’s report.
It said they had been classifying people as being in emergency accommodation when they were actually living in local authority-owned properties – or properties secured by the local authorities ‘under other arrangements.’
It said some authorities had also included families who had been ‘supported to remain in their own homes via additional rental supports, funded from the homelessness budget’. However, the Inner City Helping Homeless charity said it had ‘major concerns over the removal of so many people’ from the list.
ICHH chief executive Anthony Flynn said Mr Murphy ‘cannot redefine the word “homeless” at his own leisure’ and called for a review of the figures by the National Oversight & Audit Committee.
Tony Geoghegan, co-founder of the Merchants Quay Ireland charity, said the re-categorisation and exclusion of some homeless people from the figures show there is ‘a real lack of credible and reliable data’, thereby diminishing ‘the capacity of organisations and individuals involved in addressing the crisis’.
Without the re-categorisation, the number of people temporarily living in hotels and B&Bs would have stood at 11,133.
Mr Murphy survived a noconfidence motion, tabled by Sinn Féin over the housing crisis, last week. Fine Gael junior minister Catherine Byrne even threatened to vote against her colleague, before voting with the Government
Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin said Mr Murphy had ‘failed miserably’ in the portfolio.
After Fianna Fáil abstained from the vote, the final tally was 59 against the motion, 49 in favour and 29 abstentions.
It was also revealed in the Irish Daily Mail last week how 180 homeless families had been told this year their ‘best option’ would be to sleep in a Garda station as there was no accommodation available.
‘Compounds their distress’