Housing priority for homeless ended due to lack of homes

A requirement that half of all social housing available in Dublin be allocated to homeless people was dropped because the supply of empty council housing dried up, the Department of the Environment has said.

The previous minister for the environment, Alan Kelly, introduced the requirement in January 2015 following the death the previous month of homeless man Jonathan Corrie near Leinster House.

Last April, Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan wrote to Mr Kelly to ask that the policy be rescinded, due to concerns some families were entering the homeless system in the belief that they would be more likely to be housed.

Yesterday a spokesman for the department said the directive was effective in housing homeless people through the refurbishment and return to use of empty or “void” local authority homes. However, the supply of these houses and flats had been used up, with void numbers now as low as 1 per cent in Dublin.

There was a concern, he said, that other households on the social housing waiting list would be disadvantaged if the policy was continued.

“It was decided to allow local authorities to again determine housing allocations,” he said.

While the council's housing committee chairman, Daithí Doolan, said he did not believe households had been deliberately making themselves homeless, he said the 50 per cent allocation had been an ineffective way of dealing with the crisis.

Moving deckchairs

“It was only moving around the deckchairs on the

Titanic

,” he said. “Fifty per cent of what was being allocated wasn’t having any impact on the housing crises. Building new homes is the only way to do that.”

In the first three months of the year, just over 400 new tenancies were allocated across all four Dublin local authorities.

Mr Doolan said the 50 per cent allocation policy was frustrating for social housing applicants, some of whom were living in “Dickensian” conditions for up to 15 years.

However, “I haven’t dealt with anyone who has deliberately made themselves homeless.”