Ireland’s Minister for Housing has said in an interview that a recent spike in homelessness numbers is largely down to foreign migrants arriving in Ireland.
Migrants from both inside and outside the European Economic Area are now a significant driver for the increase of homelessness in Ireland, the country’s housing minister has said in an interview.
While the country is currently struggling to deal with a surge of migrants and refugees who claim to be fleeing war-torn Ukraine, Minister Darragh O’Brien was keen to emphasise that the new arrivals leading to the homelessness spike were not in any way associated with the ostensibly Ukrainian influx.
During an interview conducted by Irish radio station Newstalk, the minister emphasised that the around 4 per cent increase in homelessness within a month is part of a larger trend across Europe, which has reportedly seen immigrants arrive without plans to obtain housing.
“It has been a matter of discussion at EU-level,” the minister said during the interview.
“What it does do is that it makes it very difficult for us to be able to plan capacity, particularly on emergency accommodation for our homeless cohort,” he continued. “Because, from week to week, we can have people literally arriving in that week and seeking homeless supports, and obviously that’s not something that we can predict.”
When asked why foreign immigrants would be coming to Ireland without the capacity of obtaining a home, Minister O’Brien refused to give an answer.
“I am not going to speculate on that,” the Fianna Fáil minister said, before adding that: “The fact of the matter is… it puts a significant strain on our services, and has been doing [so] for a long number of months now.”
The revelation regarding Ireland’s homelessness figures comes as the Western European nation struggles to deal with a large influx of people claiming to be Ukrainian refugees, with the government having said that they expect as many as 200,000 Ukrainians could come to the island.
While Ireland has yet to see a large proportion of this number, according to an Irish Times report, the nation’s current rulers appear concerned with how the new migrant crisis is interacting with the island’s existing housing crisis.
For example, a plan to house Ukrainian refugees in refurbished social housing was reportedly rejected over fears that it could create resentment for refugees amongst the Irish population, with the housing minister during the Newstalk interview also emphasising that new developments to do with social housing would go towards accommodating people on waiting lists for such accommodation, and not Ukrainian refugees.
However, what good this will do is unknown considering that as many as 30 per cent of those on social housing lists are born abroad, according to data from 2021.
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