Focus Ireland calls for laws to ensure no child sleeps rough

Legislation to ensure no child sleeps rough must be introduced urgently, housing charity Focus Ireland has said.

Mike Allen, the organisation's director of advocacy, made the call after three children under the age of six slept rough in Dublin for three nights.

The children, boys aged five, three and two, were with their parents in Mountjoy Square at 11.30pm on Monday when contacted by the Inner City Helping Homeless organisation.

The family, originally from Romania but living in Rialto for over a year, had been evicted from their private rented accommodation last week. The father works for a waste-recycling company.

"We went to the location and found two children in sleeping bags on a bench and the baby asleep in a buggy, with their parents standing guard over them," said Anthony Flynn, founder of ICHH. "This should not have happened. Someone was not doing their job last night."

Emergency accommodation

The family was taken to the charity’s depot on Killarney Street where they stayed until morning. Emergency accommodation had been allocated on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Dublin Region Homeless Executive said.

A key worker who speaks Romanian and a childcare worker have been assigned to the family. Brother Kevin Crowley, manager of the Capuchin Day Centre, said the family had arrived there on Monday morning, having slept over the weekend in the Phoenix Park. He said he referred them to Focus Ireland.

Focus Ireland does not place families in emergency accommodation but liaises with central placements unit (CPU), which allocates emergency accommodation on behalf of the DRHE. Mr Allen said staff were told no emergency accommodation was available. At about 7 pm, the rough-sleeper intake team operated by Focus Ireland and the Peter McVerry Trust was told the family would be in Mountjoy Square.

They continued to advocate for them with the out-of-hours service, who again said there was no emergency accommodation available. At that stage the intake team gave them sleeping bags and did three things:

“They informed the gardaí in Mountjoy that there was a family with children in Mountjoy Square with nowhere to go. They prepared a child welfare report and they put out a general call to other organisations.”

He said 17 families with children at risk of sleeping rough had come to Focus Ireland’s attention in July and staff believed five had slept rough. “The family homeless crisis is getting out of control and must now be treated as a national emergency,” he said.

No obligation

Under the 2009 Housing Act a “housing authority may provide housing services . . . including . . . services provided to homeless persons”. There is no legal obligation on the local authority to do so.

Mr Allen said this must change where children were involved. “The Government needs to send a clear directive to all local authorities that where a family is assessed as being homeless they must be found emergency accommodation for the night,” he said.