Louth TD Gerry Adams has condemned the refusal by the Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy to provide a County by County breakdown on the number of homeless families and children. Teachta Adams described the failure to provide this statistic as “symptomatic of a government which seeks to evade its responsibilities to provide housing by refusing to provide the extent of the problem County by County across the State.”

Gerry Adams said:

“The official figures produced by the Department of Housing cover regions. Louth is part of the North East region which includes Louth, Monaghan and Cavan. The most recent report for October revealed there are 144 adults and 47 children living in homeless accommodation in the North East. The report also states that 131 homeless adults are from Louth, 3 are from Monaghan and 10 from Cavan. There are 27 families and 47 homeless children in the North East region.

“The statistics do not tell us how many homeless families there are in Louth or any of the Counties or how many of the 47 homeless children are in Louth.

“I wrote to the Minister asking for this information and in a PQ response he simply e-mailed me the most recent October report on Homelessness from the Department which does not answer the questions I asked.

“This is a serious gap of information which means we do not have a complete picture of the homeless crisis as it impacts on Counties. We know there are over 10,500 homeless citizens, almost four thousand of whom are children. As we try to understand the impact of this on people and seek to provide solutions to this crisis the more information available the better.

“I intend writing again to the Minister for Housing asking that the Department provide this information which must already be in their possession.

“Minister Murphy has failed in his responsibility as Housing Minister to provide a coherent strategy to tackle the homelessness and rent crisis, as well as producing a credible public housing building programme.”