McVerry: Government’s homeless plan not working
The Government must concede that its strategy to reduce homelessness is not working, according to leading campaigner Fr Peter McVerry. He said society should be outraged at the image which emerged last week of a homeless five-year-old eating his dinner off cardboard on a street in Dublin.
“We should be absolutely outraged at that,” he said. “But that’s yesterday’s news. And we’ve forgotten about it already. We move on. Things become normalised. What really annoys me is that the Government keeps saying that its policy is working, and that we have to give them more time.
“It is more than three years since they introduced Rebuilding Ireland — their strategy to reduce homelessness — and virtually every single month for the last three years the number of homeless people has gone up. At what point do you say our strategy is not working? We have got to revisit it. The emperor has no clothes. The emperor won’t acknowledge that they have no clothes.
“We’ve got to revisit Rebuilding Ireland — it’s clearly not working.
If you were running a business losing money and you were asked to come up with a strategy to reduce those losses, if after three years the company was not just losing money, but losing more money every month, somebody would say that strategy isn’t working. I think we have to apply that to the Government’s strategy on homelessness.
Fr McVerry was speaking during a visit to the Cork Penny Dinners soup kitchen yesterday for the launch of its first supported housing project. The charity has bought and renovated a city centre apartment which will provide a home with a range of wraparound supports to six people from next month.
“This is what local authorities should be doing,” said Mr McVerry. “They should be looking and funding opportunities like this,.
“Everybody is entitled to have a home. It’s a basic human right. We are denying that right to tens of thousands of people and there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency at trying to ensure that that right is provided to people.”
However, Fr McVerry said the homeless crisis can be solved if the Government ramps up construction of local authority housing by the thousands, in the long term.
