Banty McEnaney: Housing Refugees & Homeless – €200m Profits
Ireland‘s Homelessness Crisis: A cycle of Short-Termism adn State Weakness
Dublin, Ireland – A damning critique of Ireland’s approach to homelessness and asylum seeker accomodation has emerged, highlighting a pervasive “repeated short-termism” driven by an over-reliance on private contractors. Experts warn this strategy leaves the State in a “weak bargaining position,” effectively begging private providers for housing and implicating vulnerable individuals in the “waste of public money.”
Mike Allen, director of advocacy at homeless charity Focus Ireland, argues that the current system operates in a perpetual state of crisis, lacking a long-term, strategic vision. This reactive approach,he contends,forces local authorities into a position where they are “almost begging private providers to find accommodation.”
Allen’s criticisms are not aimed at individual providers but at the government for fostering a system almost entirely dependent on the private sector. He points to successive housing policies that have left many refugees, despite having permission to live and work in Ireland, unable to secure private housing and consequently reliant on local authorities for support. This can lead to a peculiar situation where individuals might end up in State-provided accommodation “owned by the same landlord but operated by a different arm of the State.”
These sentiments are echoed by mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Housing Executive, who recently described the homeless system to an Oireachtas Committee as an “institutional discharge from one institution to another.” Latest figures from the DRHE indicate that a primary driver of adult-only homelessness is individuals leaving direct provision.
Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute, characterizes some European international protection systems, including Ireland’s, as having developed a “permanent temporariness” in their approach to asylum. “What you’re effectively doing is warehousing peopel in the absence of a longer-term plan,” he stated.
Susan Fratzke, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, emphasizes the importance of government capacity to “flex up and flex down” in response to unpredictable migration patterns, often driven by conflict and climate change. While acknowledging the crucial role of State-owned properties in a functioning asylum housing system, she also stresses the necessity of engaging private contractors.Fratzke advises European governments to plan for fluctuations, enabling them to prepare for future surges when numbers inevitably decrease.
“This causes political tension because governments don’t like to say we’re planning for a rise in asylum claims, they prefer to talk about what they’re doing to reduce numbers,” Fratzke observed. “But they could save money by being more realistic about these numbers. That requires political will.”
In response to these concerns, a Department of Justice spokesman stated that the government is committed to “developing a more stable and lasting accommodation system in the long term.” The department is actively working to reduce reliance on the private sector by acquiring “more accommodation on State-owned lands,” citing the recent purchase of Citywest Hotel and campus as an example.
Similarly, the Department of Housing has pledged to reduce reliance on private emergency accommodation and secure supported housing operated by ngos, indicating ongoing efforts to address the systemic issues plaguing Ireland’s housing and asylum support systems.