Simon challenges Ahern to honour promises

Simon Community's annual report: Dublin Simon Community has challenged the Taoiseach to honour pre-election funding promises as the Labour Party accused the Government of penalising voluntary agencies that did not sign up to the new partnership agreement.

The Minister of State for the Environment, Mr Noel Ahern, has rejected the claims and said that funding was not an issue.

Speaking at the launch yesterday of the Dublin Simon Community's annual report, its chief executive, Mr Greg Maxwell, said it would take until 2050 to rehouse Dublin's homeless at current rates of progress.

Mr Maxwell said about 50 single homeless people were housed a year, and it would take another 47 years to solve the problem if the number becoming homeless did not increase.

Agencies dealing with homelessness receive €22 million in funding. Mr Maxwell said a further €5.4 million for all the agencies in Dublin, including about €1 million for Simon, would take care of the essential day-to-day programmes.

"The Taoiseach has helped us in the past but he has taken his eye off the ball on this one. It's not rocket science," he said.

Dublin Simon's campaigns manager, Mr Bob Jordan, said the number of "new contacts", people using Simon outreach services for the first time, had more than doubled, and the number of new contacts for the first quarter of 2003 was higher than for the first six months of last year.

In the first three months of last year, 37 people contacted the agency's outreach services, such as its soup-runs, for the first time. A year later the figure had almost trebled, to 110.

Three years ago, the Government launched a national homelessness strategy in response "to what they admitted was a crisis situation", the Simon chief executive said. "Today the crisis remains, but the Government's promises that funding would not be an issue are sounding very hollow."

Labour's Environment spokesman, Mr Eamon Gilmore, claimed the Government was "screwing" voluntary agencies like the Simon Community because of their critical approach to the Government, a view the Taoiseach's spokeswoman rejected.

"The amount of money that is a problem doesn't make sense - €5.4 million is not big money and the Department of Environment could make those kind of savings easily," Mr Gilmore said. "I think the Government is screwing agencies like the Simon Community for funding because they took a critical view and did not sign up to the partnership agreement."

The Minister of State, Mr Ahern, rejected this and said that "no word went out from this office to stop funding". He said that the money for homelessness was "rocketing" and if €5.4 million was going to solve the problem it was certainly being provided.

Asked about Simon's criticism of the Government, he said that "it is the easiest thing in the world to bash government" but funding had increased to €43 million last year and was up to €50 million this year. Some agencies, he said, were "jockeying for position".

The Minister believed everybody accepted that emergency accommodation was catered for and the great focus now was the shortage in transition accommodation, for people whose position had been stabilised. He said the Government provided funding for the Simon outreach staff, who were now reaching more and more people.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Labour's Cllr Dermot Lacey, said the response to homelessness was a huge "moral scandal" of the Celtic Tiger economy. There was a "little done but a hell of a lot more to do".