“That is madness,” says Louisa Santoro, CEO of the Mendicity Institution. “A single person is not a sufficient level of staff to run any homeless service.”
Both Dublin City Council and the Fine Gael-Labour government are moving forward with plans to bring in modular homes for homeless families by Christmas.
On North Inner-City development, rising rents and the homelessness crisis, the government is looking out for property interests, rather than the people’s interests.
People at risk of losing their homes because their rent supplement is inadequate can get top-ups, but many suffer because they don’t know this is possible.
Until we build more homes, we need to raise the rent supplement, introduce rent certainty and make several other changes, writes Bob Jordan, chief executive of housing charity Threshold.
In our illustrated comment of the week, Robert Mirolo depicts one reader’s suggestion that ships could be a temporary solution to Dublin’s housing crisis.
Deputy Lord Mayor Cieran Perry talks about his involvement in the 1990s anti-drug movement and how the government needs to move faster on homelessness.
Dublin City Council doesn’t want housing activists to move homeless families into the abandoned hostel now, perhaps because of a plan from an organisation called Novas Initiatives to turn it into social housing later.
Dublin City Council has begun planning for the construction of 400 prefabricated houses to accommodate homeless families. While some councillors are very wary, prefab housing has come a long way over the years and other countries have good experiences with it.
