Tourism sparks worry over hotel beds for homeless this summer

Minister for Children Katherine Zappone has said she is worried that hotel accommodation may not be available for homeless families during the summer because of tourism.

Ms Zappone said she was very distressed as Minister for Children but also “just as a human being and citizen of this country”, about the knock-on effects on children in homelessness accommodation and in hotels.

She was answering Dáil questions from Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger who highlighted how homeless children were falling behind in school, losing their friends and incurring stigma, shame and depression. Obesity was also becoming a problem for children in hotels where families had no cooking facilities.

Ms Zappone said she was aware that of children in hotels were away from their schools, and families did not have facilities to cook.

But “as we approach the summer months one of our great concerns is that hotel accommodation may not even be available because of what is going on in terms of the tourism industry”.

She said however that she had brought together a number of agencies and people to discuss the issue and she and Minister for Housing Simon Coveney were beginning work on a plan "specifically to address children who are homeless".

Within the next few weeks “I will gather the stakeholders again to identify short-term measures as well as beginning to plan for medium-term measures in order to ensure our children are cared for in that context”.

Contentious decision

Ms Zappone also said of the Government that “we only have a certain amount of time” to deal with the homeless crisis. “Judge us on what we manage to do. I am happy to be judged on that,” she told Ms Coppinger.

The Opposition TD had questioned Ms Zappone’s controversial decision to “join a Government that allowed this situation to develop in the first place” where the number of homeless children had doubled from 726 in 2014 to 1,570 currently.

The Minister agreed it was not a “universally popular decision” for her as an Independent TD to join the Government , but she said this issue was a key concern for her and she had already done a number of things in bringing stakeholders together and in making a commitment to work closely with Cabinet colleagues.

Ms Coppinger said it was an “absolute scandal in an EU state” that children were being put in adult hostels, sleeping on inflatable beds where no other accommodation could be found.

The Minister agreed was it “clearly undesirable”, but was sometimes the only option to ensure families did not sleep rough and it only occurred late at night when accommodation could not be found through family accommodation or commercial hotels. She said they had to work to reduce its occurrence.

The Minister also said she was appalled that the alternative for women and children who would be homeless was to stay in violent homes, as had been reported by the Sonas Housing Association. She was deeply concerned about that, but the Government should be judged on what they managed to do.