Homelessness: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-15 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel Many people have referred to the numbers of homeless, which continually rise. There are over 17,000 at this stage, including nearly 5,500 children. Worryingly, more and more people over 65 are facing homelessness. The fact that older people, who have lived their lives and contributed so much to the State, can find themselves in emergency accommodation is a terrible indictment of this State. I commend Cavan County Council, which does huge work in trying to prevent people from going into homelessness. The council is successful but, unfortunately, it just cannot accommodate everybody and some people have to be put in emergency accommodation. Cavan does not have any hostel. It has two bed and breakfasts that the council uses as emergency accommodation for families. Beyond that, it has to send people to the hostel in Dundalk run by the Simon Community or down to a bed and breakfast in Roscommon. People do not want to go because they are too far away and are very hard to get to. There is no good transport route to those places and people want to stay in their own county. What happens then is that we see a lot of hidden homelessness, with people sofa-surfing or staying in their parents' box room. I see quite a number who are sleeping rough at times and then maybe staying on their friend's sofa at other times. Increasingly, a large number of young men are affected. Single people tend to be on the housing waiting list the longest. I am trying to help number of young men at the moment, many of whom have addiction problems. Some of them have been in and out of prison. It is a chicken and egg situation. There is no out for them. There are no community-based supports, wraparound supports or the addiction or mental health supports they need to sustain a tenancy. Until we have those supports, they are going to continue to be in and out of prison causing problems in society. Some of them will actually say they sometimes end up getting sent to prison on purpose because they want somewhere warm and dry to sleep and to get a few meals, which is terrible. We need to incorporate Sharing the Vision, the mental health strategy, into our homelessness prevention framework as well, put those wraparound supports in place for people who require them and ensure they can enjoy a sustainable tenancy. I have also come across a number of care leavers who are not getting the required support to get them into accommodation either. This is an already very vulnerable group who have been in the care system, maybe with different foster families, and are now are out on their own. They not getting sufficient support and some of them are ending up homeless as well and sleeping rough. Senator Higgins mentioned people in congregated settings and I absolutely agree with her. It also brings to mind the Before I Die campaign. This involves a large number of adults with intellectual disabilities or autism in their 20, 30s, 40s or 50s who are living with elderly parents. These adults are on the housing list but are not being accommodated, not because the the local authority is not willing to accommodate them but because the HSE is not willing to put in the care and support plan. We need to see an awful lot more co-operation between local authorities and HSE to ensure the supports are put in for those people to be able to live independently. If a parent is no longer able to provide the care or passes away, that vulnerable person is put into emergency accommodation or an emergency residential setting, which is often far away from family and friends and their day service. The person is trying to cope with grieving for a lost parent as well as a new living arrangement, which is very unfair. Many families who are above the social housing threshold and have received eviction letters do not qualify for social housing or any other supports but cannot afford the enormous rents being asked for private rented accommodation and are left in limbo. They are not earning enough to look for a mortgage but they are earning too much to be on the social housing list. A lot of families are caught in that loophole and we need to address that without delay. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-15