Homeless response ‘should focus on needs of children’

A campaign to require local authorities to take the ‘best interests of the child’ into account when working with families who are homeless will today be unveiled by Focus Ireland.

At the end of March 2023, there were 3,472 children in emergency accommodation, an increase of 662 children since March last year.

Mike Allen, the director of advocacy with Focus Ireland, told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland that local authority staff were working extremely hard to deal with this crisis but needed more direction, training and support.

Focus Ireland is calling for the reintroduction and passing into law of the Housing (Homeless Families) Bill 2017, a piece of Private Members’ legislation introduced into the Dáil in 2017 by Jan O’Sullivan.

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The Bill aimed to amend the 1988 Housing Act so that local authorities would be required to consider the ‘best interests of the child’ in their decision making when a family presented as homeless.

Under the legislation, which the campaign is calling to be enacted, local authorities would be required to apply that test, said Mr Allen.

Local authorities are currently saying to families seeking help: “go back to your brother or your sister or a friend and stay with them and sleep on their sofa for the next while until you can sort yourself out”, Mr Allen said.

But no checks were being made to see if that was in the best interest of the child, he added.

Mr Allen said that the legislation would not “solve all the problems” but that its great advantage was its simplicity and its clarity.

We could spend another five years doing some really elaborate piece of legislation and getting it through the Dáil “or we could do something that would begin to make a difference,” he said.

“Experiencing homelessness is a dreadful thing for anybody, man, woman or child, but particularly for children. It’s an appalling experience,” Mr Allen said.

“First of all, there’s the trauma of losing your home where you think you’re comfortable, where you feel safe, where your toys are, your friends are, your all of your relationships.

“The loss of their home is traumatic in the first place. Then emergency accommodation may be a long way from your school and there may be no place for doing homework. You can’t invite your friends around. You lose all that sort of social contact,” he said.

“And still, despite the fact that we’ve been in a homeless crisis affecting families for almost ten years now, there’s an awful lot of stigma involved in it for the children. And children are ashamed to say they’re homeless to their friends. And their parents are still ashamed of something that is not their fault at all.

“That shame and that stigma can lead to even deeper social isolation and problems,” he said.

Mr Allen said that the level of response to the crisis by the country had been “slapdash”.

“We’ve always treated the family homeless crisis as the thing that’s a flash in the pan, that is going to go away, and we have never put in place proper structures, procedures to make sure that we reduce the impact of the harm.”

On the issue of housing, he said Ireland was “behaving worse” than it did when the country was poorer.