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THE PROVISION OF one-night only emergency accommodation to families and children should be ceased, an Oireachtas Committee is set to recommend later today.
The Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government is due to meet today at 12pm in the Oireachtas. It is understood the committee will recommend a number of amendments to the Housing Act 1988, including to cease the provision of one-night emergency accommodation to people.
One-night housing is understood, the committee will say, to be one of the most detrimental forms of emergency accommodation. Experts will instead recommend that stable placements in suitable temporary accommodation for families be provided.
People staying in one-night accommodation in general cannot access their rooms until 8pm at night and must leave again by 9.30am. This results in families having no secure places to stay during the day, and also with no facilities for washing clothes or cooking food. They also face difficulties registering their children for school or accessing healthcare as they have no fixed address.
It is understood the report on the committee meeting says homelessness is “one of the most pressing issues” in Irish society.
The committee is also due to recommend:
Representatives from Focus Ireland, the Children’s Rights Alliance, the Office of the Ombudsman for Children and the Mercy Law Resource Centre will all address the committee later today.
Focus Ireland will say that only 9% of the children on their caseload have a child support worker.
Focus Ireland and the Ombudsman for Children’s Office are set to advise against setting up a new inspection body to avoid institutionalising the thinking around homelessness and to avoid the assumption that it will become a permanent fixture in Irish society. They will instead recommend an independent body to carry out the inspections.
There are 1,756 homeless families with 3,873 homeless children living in Ireland, according to Department of Housing figures from September 2019.
Reducing homelessness
Many of the recent causes of homelessness around the country are believed to be caused by an inability to secure accommodation in the privately rented sector, the committee will hear.
The committee is set to say it would like to see measures put in place to mitigate and reduce the effects of homelessness on families and children and bring a system change to prevent this situation happening again in the future.
The Housing Act 1988 should also be amended to put a statutory duty on housing authorities to regard the best interests of the child as most important and to regard the needs of the family, the committee will recommend.
These suggestions have been welcomed by the network of homeless charities the Simon Communities who emphasised the need for a right to housing.
“While we recognise that this will not be the single solution to ending our housing crisis, we firmly believe that constitutional change will increase the scope of actions that the Oireachtas can take to address this crisis,” national spokesperson for the Simon Communities Wayne Stanley said in a statement.
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Too much profit in this algorithm. They will never turn this off we’ve all been victim to it in one way or the other the ” rabbit hole”
@Paul H: Exactly, they’re exploiting us thinking that immigration is now the solely big problem of Ireland, and not housing and health system; they are not making money from housing and health, but from fighting between us regarding immigration.
Cesspools like Meta seriously need to have much harsher penalties and sanctions for openly allowing and exposing disgusting and malicious content onto its platforms.
Ag yes, the EU; lover of corporates, disliker of its own citizens. Serious discussions needed around our future participation in the EU with the direction it seems to be headed
@Lewis Armstrong: where would we be without the EU. Clown
@Michael o Dwyer: We don’t need the EU.
@Michael o Dwyer: Better off that we are now! Able to set out own laws without interference; able to deport gimmigrants; able to save money (we are a net contributor to the EU and have been for years).
If tobacco didn’t exist and someone started trying to market it tomorrow it would be shut down straight away and rightly classified as hazardous. But because it does exist and has the all-powerful money invested in it you can’t outright ban it for fear of upsetting the elite, you can only try to reduce it’s market and hope it goes away,
Social Media is similar in that if someone brought out X/FB/Inst tomorrow and we know now what the effect of these platforms is going to be then most likely they would be rejected, by the citizenry anyway. But we didn’t reject them, or legislate for what powers they might have, and subsequently abuse, when they first started up, that was a job for the gov of the time. They are now multi-billion dollar industries and their power can’t be shutdown or easily controlled. They will always be steps ahead in harvesting new users no matter what rules are put in place.
The final nail in the coffin is politicians and political parties, here in Ireland and in most countries, have aligned themselves with social media because it has turned out to be great way of brainwashing the masses and winning elections. So the government(s) have no real reason to tackle this when to do so would be to their own detriment, unless we give them a reason to deal with it? They may not do brown envelopes anymore but the back-scratching corruption continues, to our detriment.
Finally, a little government like ours may not be able to bring in the necessary rules to stop social medias toxic side, but it could at first, decide to break the link between politics and social media by banning no FB pages, X profiles etc etc for parties and politicians and, at least, ending the cozy partnership they have.
We’re all fighting between us regarding immigration, and social media companies are poring billions (for real) in their profits. So now we all think that immigration is the only big important social issue in Ireland, when it’s not, it’s something that will be tackled more or less, etc, but then we will still have housing issues and health system issues. We are being played and what’s more important, a lot of us will spoil their vote because of that.
I am all for child protection. I think there needs be a redoubling of efforts. I cannot understand why the usual suspects objected to “The Sound Of Freedom”. Having said that, we need parameters and definition. What is harmful content exactly? Is the definition broad or narrow? Who exactly gets to decide? Are the adjudicators appointed or elected? A just a comment on the reporting above – we have to watch out for women and anorexia as well as men and porn. A cursory search will show that over 30% of those that watch porn are women and over 20% of those with anorexia are men. Just saying.
@Oh Mammy: Go on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter (refuse to call it X), and you will find out very quickly what the definition of “toxic” and “harmful” is.
Will someone please think of the children!
@Daniel – that a very nasty and obvious portion of it. It’s not really that part I am talking about.
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