Growing amount of people staying in direct provision as they cannot find accommodation - NGO

Vivienne Clarke

The executive director of Simon Communities of Ireland, Ber Grogan, has said that the trend of people in direct provision not leaving because they cannot find accommodation is growing, with a sharp increase in the past five years.

It was an issue that Simon Communities of Ireland and other NGOs have been raising for a number of years, she told RTÉ radio’s Today with David McCullagh show.

It has been coming up at the National Homeless Action Committee (NHAC), chaired by the Housing Minister, Grogan said.

"Ourselves and other NGOs have been saying there's a cohort of around 5,000 people in Ipas accommodation that are legally allowed to stay here and can't move out and that number isn't captured in the official homeless statistics.

“There has been this kind of back and forth between the Departments of Housing and Justice for a number of years, kind of saying well, who takes ownership of this issue and who's going to help resolve it?" she said.

"So local authorities do collect data on the reasons that people present as in need of homeless emergency accommodation and that data is available in the performance reviews on the gov.ie on the Department of Housing website. So you can literally go in and track that trend over the years.”

Grogan added that in 2020 the figure was 39 people, but by 2025 that had risen to nearly 700 people.

“So the trend is going in one way and it's because of that lack of appropriate accommodation and move-on options.”

The issue was being “siloed” by the two government departments involved, she said.

“I'm not aware that there's enough support across all local authorities and again at the NHAC meetings what we were told by Minister Brown at a recent one was that he had written to the Minister for Justice.

“There's been kind of this siloing, you know, of Departments and who's responsible. So as far as I know, now maybe they've introduced very recently, but the Departments were going to work together for those supports before people were pushed out of IPAS accommodation and into homelessness."

Grogan described the issue as "entirely predictable and fixable.

"It's really not fair that we have a cohort of people who are more vulnerable to access in the private rental sector or who are just kind of being pushed from pillar to post.

“The way we solve this problem is that decisions are currently being made about Budget 2027. There's an opportunity now to put that siloed thinking aside and to properly invest in homeless prevention and that will mean all the necessary departments, social protection, housing, health, justice, giving sufficient resources to the homeless prevention framework that's being developed at the moment.

“There are a couple of things over the next couple of months that can be done to say we're actually all working together on this.”