THE GOVERNMENT has been urged to invest €4 billion in social and affordable housing to meet its own target of eliminating homelessness by 2010.
Housing and homeless agency Focus Ireland said with 10,000 unsold housing units in Dublin alone, there was an opportunity to make up for successive governments' failure to deliver on social housing targets during the economic boom.
While there were some 1,000 homeless and 12,000 on local authority housing waiting lists in 1985 when Focus was founded, those numbers have risen to 5,000 and 43,000 respectively.
Focus president Sr Stanislaus Kennedy said a "conscious decision'' by the Government to transfer responsibility for housing to the private sector had failed, illustrated by the recent abandonment by developers of social housing projects. She warned that as the country faced a downturn, the most vulnerable who benefited least from the boom must not be made to pay the price.
She was speaking at the launch of the charity's annual report, which said it has helped some 700 households to secure a home under its five-year strategy (2005-2010). However, it said there were still some 5,000 people homeless. It estimated that the Government will be 25,000 units or 40 per cent short of meeting its social and affordable housing targets by the end of 2009.
Focus said the Government must allocate €4 billion in the budget to acquire 10,000 social, 6,000 affordable and 2,000 new rental accommodation scheme homes in 2009. Launching the report in Dublin's City Hall, journalist and broadcaster Vincent Browne said there was an "extraordinary" absence of discussion at political level about the general corruption and "vast inequality" which has resulted in a "spectacularly unfair and cruel society''.
