Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Child poverty and child homelessness are completely unacceptable. We have 190,000 children at risk of poverty in this country. One of the most damning facts is that child homelessness has gone through the roof and we now have 4,105 children and 2,000 families living in emergency accommodation. Child homelessness has gone up from October 2021, when there were 2,300 children in emergency accommodation, to over 4,100 now. It is shameful. The trauma, stigma and mental health impact on children are utterly unacceptable.

What I want to know is what the Government is going to do about it. In every case of child homelessness that I come across, there does not seem to be a policy to stop children and their families from going into homelessness. When they are in homelessness, unless they are at the top of the housing list, they are told to find a HAP tenancy. However, the rents are so far ahead of the HAP thresholds that they have no chance of finding anywhere, so they are trapped in homelessness. In some cases, if the parents, or one of the parents, have an income that is over the threshold, they cannot even get HAP and they are totally trapped in homeless accommodation. Yet, the Government will not do anything to raise the thresholds, control the rents or increase the amount of social and affordable housing that we are getting in private developments. What is the Government going to do to get children out of the homelessness trap?

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