Almost 5,000 children are homeless in Ireland
There are almost 5,000 homeless children in Ireland, according to the latest figures.
Homelessness has reached another record high, with the data showing 15,747 people now in emergency accommodation.
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The data shows that 10,903 adults and 4,844 children were accessing emergency accommodation during the last week of May.
This is an increase on the 15,418 people, 4,675 of whom were children, recorded in April.
The statistics do not include people sleeping rough, those that may be couch-surfing or homeless in hospitals or prisons, or those who are in shelter for asylum seekers or domestic violence centres.
In Dublin, there were 11,323 people in emergency accommodation, including 3,539 children.
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Focus Ireland CEO Pat Dennigan said the new figures show that the Government's 'current approach to homelessness is failing'.
'There needs to be far more urgency in the Government's response to help end this terrible human crisis,' he added.
Ber Grogan, executive director of the Simon Communities of Ireland, said: 'We haven't seen a decrease in homeless figures for five months – and the last drop was due to temporary seasonal relief over Christmas.
'This is not progress. We don't want to keep breaking these records.
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'Behind every number is a person – a family, a child, a life in crisis. The time to act is now.'
Sinn Féin spokesman for housing Eoin Ó Broin said there has been a 450 per cent increase in child homelessness in the last 10 years.
'One of the most depressing parts of the report is the increase in the number of children forced to live, in many cases for long periods of time, in emergency accommodation,' Mr O Broin said.
'When this family and in particular, child homeless, crisis really started escalating it was in 2014, there were 880 children in emergency accommodation. There is now almost 5,000 children [in emergency accommodation].
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'That is a 450 per cent increase, thousands upon thousands of children have been forced into emergency accommodation because of bad Government housing policy.'
Labour TD Conor Sheehan accused the Government of 'normalising' homelessness.
'As true as night follows days, another level of record homelessness. This is a stain on Government, a stain that they are ignoring, that they have continuously ignored,' he added.
'This is a Government who has normalised homelessness and this is a Government who has almost made child homelessness acceptable.
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'A child who enters homelessness is more likely to have poorer outcomes across every metric for the rest of their life, poor outcomes when it comes to educational attainment and poor outcomes in making them quite likely to enter homelessness as an adult.'
Social Democrats TD and the party's spokesman for housing Rory Hearne said it was 'deeply upsetting and shocking' to see the State heading towards 16,000 people homeless across the country.
He said there should be a state redress scheme for children who have been forced into emergency accommodation.
He added: 'There are now 4,844 children homeless in this state. This is a national scandal.
'Figures released to me by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive shows that in Dublin alone, almost 17,000 children have been through emergency accommodation since 2016.
'That is unacceptable. We are talking about, potentially, a state redress scheme for children who have been through emergency accommodation because it is absolutely preventable and the state has known since early on in the crisis.
'The state knows any lengthy time is deeply damaging for children.'
Mr Hearne added: 'There's also real concern that with the Government's new rental measures, which are due to come in in March, that between now and March we're going to see evictions, an increase in evictions by landlords to get a vacant property so they can increase the rents to market rent from March onwards, but also to get in evictions before those changes come in place.
'We're calling on the government to immediately implement a no fault evictions ban across the board.'
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