Peter McVerry Trust to provide extra emergency accommodation

The Peter McVerry Trust has announced that it will provide emergency accommodation for 100 single people and 24 families in Dublin before Christmas.

The charity said the new accommodation “represents the single largest phase of new provision it has provided to date” and means that it will be providing emergency accommodation to over 600 people per night in Dublin and Kildare.

Pat Doyle, chief executive officer of the Peter McVerry Trust said the charity was “doing everything it could to provide high quality emergency shelter to those in need”.

“Our goal has always been to do whatever we can to respond to the need that exists. The unfortunate reality is that the number of people in homelessness continues to grow and as a result we need to secure significant increases in emergency accommodation provision.”

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The new services are located in Dublin city, Fingal and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown. The charity is also expanding one of its city centre hostels to provide more emergency accommodation for single women.

“In order to get families out of hostels and to prevent other families entering the hotel system we are going to provide emergency accommodation for 24 families in two new family hubs in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown and Fingal,” Mr Doyle said.

“This will bring to five the number of family hubs that we operate. These emergency accommodation services offer a vast improvement on hotels and B&B’s. Our staff are making every effort to secure long term housing for families in our hubs to make their stay in homelessness as short as possible.”

The latest figures for October 2017 show there were almost 8,500 adults and children classified as homeless.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the Dáil last month 200 single or double rooms would be in place by December 18th for those sleeping on the street.

“We want to get to a position where we’re assured that there will be a bed available and shelter for everyone who needs it over the winter period and into the spring and summer as well,” he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Housing said “the majority have been put in place and any that haven’t will be in the next few days”.