Council spends €500k on homeless lodgings after being told to end practice

Galway City Tribune – Almost half a million euro was spent accommodating homeless people in city B&Bs and hotels in the five months after the Government’s deadline to end the practice had passed.

Tánaiste Simon Coveney, when he was Housing Minister last year, declared that the policy of using private hotels and B&Bs to house homeless families would be phased-out by the middle of 2017.

However, the Galway City Tribune has established that the practice of housing families in hotels and B&Bs remains the norm in Galway, months after that deadline was missed.

Figures released to this newspaper under Freedom of Information (FOI) confirm some €446,000 was spent by Galway City Council for emergency accommodation from July to December 2017.

The expenditure on emergency homeless shelter in Galway City hotels and B&Bs amounted to €55,000 in August; €91,000 in September; €103,000 in October; €81,000 in November; and €116,000 in December.

The figure includes expenditure on hotels, B&Bs and travel costs.

The local authority also supplied information giving an indication of the scale of the problem during each of those months.
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