Access to housing has reached crisis point and is getting worse throughout the country and the Government is not doing enough to help, housing lobby group Threshold said today.
Outlining details of its annual report for the year 2000, Threshold Director Mr Kieran Murphy called for a faster and more extensive response from the Government, and for the provision of an expanded social housing programme.
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Mr Murphy said Government policy, up to and including the most recent Bacon report, was "not up to the challenge".
Mr Murphy said social-housing construction was "limping along at an historically low rate at a time of rapidly lengthening waiting lists". Over 50,000 households - 125,000 people - are currently on social housing waiting lists, he said, and living in poverty.
The Threshold report showed an increase of 2,000 queries to the organisation’s three advice offices in Dublin, Cork and Galway between 1999 and 2000, with almost 20,000 people seeking advice last year.
The three most common queries related to rent hikes, short notice to quit rented accommodation, and illegal evictions.
Mr Murphy said there was a 250 per cent increase in the number of people facing illegal evictions from private rented accommodation between 1999 and 2000.
This, he said, demonstrated that vulnerable people are being left "at the hard edge of the housing crisis, while others engage in multiple home ownership and speculative investment in housing as a commodity".
"The housing crisis has not gone away", said Mr Murphy. "Our sense is that it is going to get worse".