IRELAND’S HOUSING CRISIS Lack of interest shows Taoiseach just doesn’t care
WHEN the housing crisis hit in 2014, the Government sat back and watched. Greedy landlords could hike up rents as high as they liked, giving just a few weeks’ notice to families, and there was nothing in law to stop them.
The State allowed these effective evictions to go ahead – and they are a major factor in the soaring rate of homelessness in Ireland, where more than 3,000 children are amongst the 8,000 in emergency accommodation
The powers-that-be are now trying to tell us that it’s all their own fault.
Last week, head of Dublin’s homeless executive Eileen Gleeson fed this propaganda.
She said: “Let’s be under no illusion here. When somebody becomes homeless, it doesn’t happen overnight, it takes years of bad behaviour – behaviour probably, that isn’t the behaviour of you and me. They’re quite happy to continue with the chaotic lifestyle they have.”
We’re not under any illusion – homelessness does happen overnight. And if a top civil servant is in denial over that fact, it shows the authorities are closing their eyes to what is happening on the ground. As a local advocate for families facing homelessness, I have unfortunately seen it happen repeatedly over the past few years.
There was the family living in a flat in the city’s Clanbrassil Street who couldn’t pay the doubled rent and couldn’t find alternative accommodation, and woke up one morning to find the landlord had burst in. He threw them and their belongings out on the street and changed the locks.
I am still trying to assist a young, full-time working single parent who has been living in an 18sqm bedsit with her schoolboy son for the past five years.
The mother and son share one small room. He sleeps in a pull-out bed and she sleeps on the floor. Despite writing to numerous Government Ministers about their case, including the Taoiseach, none of them have done anything to help.
Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy – whose constituency office is a few doors down from their flat in Ranelagh, Dublin – ignored calls to go and see them in.
The only politician who helped was in fact Sinn Fein’s housing spokesman Eoin O Broin, who established they were entitled to a Housing Assistance Payment.
We are now attempting the seemingly impossible task of finding alternative rental accommodation for the family. Emotion must be put aside to concentrate on solutions – but those tasked with solving this crisis would show respect and concern for those stuck in the housing crisis if they and talked to the people affected, heard their stories, and saw how they lived. They’d find that Eileen Gleeson was wrong. In fact, mostly, they are just like you and me.