Housing crisis: Alan Kelly’s forum is too little, too late

WITH 6,000 people, including hundreds of children, languishing in utterly inappropriate emergency accommodation up and down the country, yesterday’s call for a cross-party platform to tackle Ireland’s abysmal housing crisis could not be more timely. 

Nor could it be more pointed, coming as it did from the country’s eight regional Simon Communities, a network of people at the coal face who know more about homelessness than any government that ever existed or is likely to be cobbled together in ongoing negotiations. Politicians should heed what Simon has to say.

Ironically, the charity’s call for immediate action came in advance of a hastily assembled forum on housing and homelessness set up by Environment Minister Alan Kelly. Indeed, so hastily convened was the event, which in reality amounts to the Labour deputy’s ministerial swansong, that apparently the Construction Industry Federation, a key part of any solution, only received its invitation the day before yesterday. Among other bodies at the conference were Nama, which controls Ireland’s biggest property portfolio for the State, and Focus Ireland, a charity set up by Sister Stan 30 years ago to put a roof over the heads of homeless people.