Peter McVerry Trust expects 7,500 homeless people by year's end

The Peter McVerry Trust (PMVT) says it expects to deal with approximately 7,500 clients this year amid the escalating homeless crisis.

Pat Doyle, the CEO of the PMVT, said this year’s client numbers would break all records and would double the number of people assisted by the charity just two years ago.

Mr Doyle made his comments at the launch of the PMVT Annual Report for 2014, and admitted that already those figures — which indicated a surge in demand for its services last year — have already been overtaken by events.

Last year the PMVT worked with almost 4,460 participants across the services, an increase of 24% on the number supported in 2013.

There was a 34% increase in the number of people provided with emergency accommodation — some 2,038 placements.

The charity also made 5,000 home visits through its Housing With Supports service and opened its fourth residential accommodation service for children out of home and under 18.

Writing in the annual report, Pat Doyle said the upward trend in participant numbers is something the charity has experienced every year since 2008, with the majority of people the PMVT worked with being young single males.

However, as both the report and figures for 2015 illustrate, the ever-increasing cost of rent, particularly in Dublin, has meant a rising number of families now pushed into homelessness, with many others at risk of joining them.

Charity’s founder, Fr Peter McVerry

Writing in the report, the charity’s founder, Fr Peter McVerry, said: “In over 35 years of working with homeless people, I have never seen the situation as bad as it is today. By the end of 2014, they were seeing 40 or 50 families each month presenting as homeless, compared to seven or eight in normal times.

“These families are being accommodated in B&Bs or hotels, where the whole family live in one room, with no facilities to cook a meal, no space for the children to play or study, often a long distance from the children’s school and having had to abandon any pets they may have been attached to.”

Pat Doyle said that situation has worsened throughout 2015: “There are up to 80 families a month now coming through. We are doing more with a lot more people this year than last year.”

The PMVT has increased its services, such as opening a facility in Co Kildare, and more homeless beds became available in the aftermath of the death of Jonathan Corrie almost a year ago, but Mr Doyle said: “That is the sadness of it — that the flow has not been stemmed.”

Jonathan Corrie

He said housing was the most critical issue at present, followed by an urgent need to raise rent supplement, citing the most recent Daft.ie rent report which showed rents in the capital grew by 8.9% in the space of a year.

The PMVT has welcomed initiatives on rent certainty introduced by Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly, but said the urgent need for housing stock meant there needed to be a greater push for refurbishing ‘voids’ around the country and measures to keep people in private rented accommodation.