Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

A figure of 357 homeless people have died in the last five years in Dublin. That is the equivalent loss of life of a transatlantic flight falling from the sky. It is a catastrophe that is happening silently and invisibly every other day on the streets in which we live. There were 47 deaths across homeless services in Dublin in 2018, 49 in 2019 and 76 in 2020. Last year, in 2021, incredibly, 115 people died in homeless services. So far this year, 70 people are recorded to have lost their lives in the Dublin homeless services. It does not bear thinking about but those figures are set to increase due to the fact that the weather is going to get colder and more severe over the next number of months.

These figures were released to Aontú by Dublin City Council under the Freedom of Information Act. If we were to submit the same question to any other local authority in Ireland right now, however, we would be met with stoney silence because no other local authority actually records the number of people who die in homelessness around the country. It is an incredible thing that the vast majority of local authorities are not even recording this. It is an absolute scandal. If we are not even measuring this incredible situation, how will we ever get to a situation where we are finding solutions to it?

I have been raising this issue of homeless deaths for the last number of years and different Ministers with responsibility for housing have tried to explain it away. Some said these deaths are just part of a natural attrition that happens. Others said these are the results of car accidents etc. The truth be told, however, and the Taoiseach should know this, homelessness is a direct cause of death. People who are homeless for longer than 18 months are eight times more likely to die than a person who is homeless for less than six months. Right now, on the streets of our capital city, people are dying directly as a result of homelessness.

When I raised this matter previously, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage commissioned Dr. Austin O'Carroll, a north inner city GP, to research the causes of these deaths and propose solutions. I welcome the fact that this happened. If the Taoiseach looks at the figures, he will see that there is little evidence we are getting to grips with this crisis. The Government is missing all of its housing targets. The Dublin Housing Delivery Group submitted a report to the Minister recently indicating that there is evidence of a slow-down in social housing projects and that work has ceased on some sites.

This is a record-breaking Government for all the wrong reasons. There are record numbers of people accessing emergency accommodation. There are record numbers of children accessing emergency accommodation. House prices are at record levels. Rents are at record levels and last year we had a record for the number of people who died in homelessness in our capital city. All of these indicators are going the wrong way under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party in government. Will the Taoiseach commit to recording the number of deaths of homeless people in every county and will he detail the progress so far on the implementation of the recommendations made in the Interim Report on Mortality in the Single Homeless Population 2020?

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