Galway homeless crisis faces into perfect storm

Fears are rising that the numbers falling into homelessness will surge in the winter months – with evictions on the rise and a worsening rental market creating ‘a perfect storm’.

That’s according to Galway City Councillor Níall McNelis who said he had been flooded with calls from people who were, in the majority, long-term tenants now facing into an already overheated rental market.

“The general trend is people in long-term rental properties, who have been there for quite some time, being served with notices to quit. The problem here is that if a landlord decides to sell their property, the tenant has very few rights,” said the Labour councillor.

“A lot of landlords are looking at the economic situation and getting a small bit jittery about the housing market, so they’re trying to get out ahead of the full economic impact of Covid-19.”

National legislation was required to ensure that long-term tenants were provided with better security of tenure, meaning that they could maintain their tenancy even if a property was sold, said Cllr McNelis.

This increase in the level of evictions, coupled with the return of students in the coming weeks, would put extreme pressure on the private rental sector, he continued.

“My fear is that because we rely so heavily on private rental, this will worsen the situation and lead to more people falling into homelessness.

“When we talk about homelessness, we think of people on the streets, which is a desperately sad situation. But what people are not seeing is those people falling into emergency accommodation or sleeping on friends’ couches without a place to call their own,” said the former Mayor.

Read the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now – or you can download a digital copy of the paper from www.connachttribune.ie