There has been an "enormous and dramatic" increase in the use of B & Bs as emergency accommodation for homeless people in Dublin, a new report has found.
This finding emerges despite a recent acknowledgment by the Government that the use of such accommodation is unacceptable, according to the Focus Ireland report, Focusing on B & Bs: The Unacceptable Growth of Emergency B & B Placement in Dublin.
There were five homeless cases in B & B accommodation in Dublin in 1990, compared to 1,202 households last year - 57 per cent of which were families.
The study shows that nearly half the 2,780 people placed in B & B accommodation last year were children (1,262). The majority of the single people were aged between 18 and 25, says the report, with over a third of homeless lone parents in this age group.
The president of Focus Ireland, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, called the conditions in B & B's "highly unstable and insecure".
"Children reared in these surroundings are at far greater risk of being destined for insecure and unstable future lives," she said, adding that it was "a shameful situation to find ourselves in" given Ireland's current economic health.
While B & B accommodation is regarded in Government policy as a temporary housing arrangement, the report finds the time spent there "has grown considerably".
The average length is three months but in some cases is over 18 months. Half of B & Bs have no facilities for cooking, many have no area to eat together as a family, and many families are sharing one or two rooms.
Another problem is that many of those housed are forced to leave the B & B during the day - "forced to walk the streets during the day in any types of weather before they're allowed to return in the evening", says the report.
