Sir, – Our Government and local councils should hang their heads in shame at the calamity wrought on homeless families through no fault of their own.
The new Focus Ireland report on "Food access and nutrition among children and parents housed in emergency accommodation" in hotels and B&Bs across the country makes grim reading, as figures reveal children eating their take-away meals off the floor or on a bed as they cannot fit a table or chairs in their small hotel room, let alone have a kitchen in which to cook a proper family meal (Front page, August 9th).
Families being housed in hotels deserve to be treated as guests and let use all the facilities of the hotels, including the dining room, residents’ lounges, etc. They should surely be allotted two to three bedrooms with one room temporarily converted to a kitchen/ sitting room for their use.
For a child or parent to be confined to life in a small hotel bedroom for weeks or months or even a year is discrimination and must be recognised as such.
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Why providing much-needed housing for homeless families and also ordinary families is proving such a disaster is beyond belief! Anyone who walks through Dublin or our other large cities can see a massive amount of new construction of offices, hotels and expensive apartments while the needs of our young and most vulnerable citizens are deliberately ignored.
Rapid housing has proved not to be very rapid. Family Hubs appear to be a form of glorified bigger hotels – when what children need are proper family homes.
Precedence must be given to social and affordable housing for families, with the authorities s commissioning builders to provide housing where profit and huge gains are not a factor but where builders get a bonus for timely completion.
Any available vacant State-owned or council buildings or lands that can be converted, must urgently be upgraded or used for housing. Older council estates and housing estates may have some extra unused land which is suitable for some smaller infill developments.
Large new sites such as Cherrywood must provide some of this housing and council land must be ring fenced for that. There is no point having acres of unused park lands when people have no homes or are unable to afford the massive rents or house prices proposed by property developers.
Summertime must be so difficult for these families with no place for children to play or run around or sit down quietly and read a book. In September they will return to school and not even have a table to sit at to do their homework, write their first letters or words in a copy book, draw or learn to read.
Transport to distant schools and pre-school for young students and children in emergency housing must be made easier with a minibus collection provided if needed.
We do not need any more government committee studies or reports, we simply need our ministers for housing, children, health, social welfare, finance and transport to urgently join together and agree to start the massive building programme needed to house families. – Yours, etc,
MARITA CONLON-
McKENNA,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.