Some housing applicants on list for eleven years

The direct provision of social housing was the best solution to ensuring shorter housing lists, Chief Executive of Galway City Council said this week.

Brendan McGrath said this at a City Council meeting following the presentation of the city’s third quarterly housing report.

Councillors didn’t hold back their frustration that almost 4,000 applicants were still on the city’s housing list, some waiting as long as 11 years.

The city has a housing stock of 2,218 dwellings of varying sizes and age and councillors were told that it was increasingly difficult to get landlords interested in the long leasing or Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS) schemes aimed at taking applicants off the housing list.

Mr McGrath said that it was his experience of working with local authorities that the direct provision of housing was the most effective solution, better than schemes which involved the renting of private properties to council tenants.

Cllr Oliver Crowe said that the long housing list was unmanageable, especially now that there was only one engineer working in the housing section instead of three.

He said he was getting calls all the time about housing issues and homelessness, one call last week was from a woman who feared her daughter (11 years on the housing list) would be homeless as she was being evicted from her private property.

Cllr Catherine Connolly described it as “a growing crisis” and that the 4,000 could be multiplied by ten to represent the number of people involved.

“The Government has abandoned support for social housing. People have a right to housing, the same as they have to clean water. It is an absolute scandal. If they don’t roll out a housing programme tomorrow (in the Budget), they have lost all respect. This council has done great work in the past 15 years especially, but when you suspend social housing programmes you will end up with a crisis.”

Cllr Declan McDonnell said in reality the 4,000 applicant list would have been more if a number of them hadn’t been lost when various schemes to address the issue were introduced.

Cllr Mike Cubbard was told there was no Plan B when he highlighted the number of vacant properties around the city that were lying empty while day centres were full to the brim.

Cllr Anna Marley said it was sad that people had become almost immune to the housing crisis because it had become so normal.

Her Sinn Féin colleague, Cllr Maireád Farrell said she, too, found the housing crisis shocking and she got calls every day about housing issues.

“People are on the brink of homelessness because they can’t find private landlords who will accept the rent allowance scheme,” she said.

The Council currently have 500 households on the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS) and 100 households on Long Term Leasing (LTL).

Most of the applicants (1,575) on the housing list were dependant on rent supplement while 1,148 were in unsuitable household circumstances. Another 439 were sharing involuntarily and hoped to have their own place.