Secretive City Council has no home for transparency

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

The homeless crisis in Galway is good news for some. Very good news indeed. There is always money to be made out of other people’s suffering, and so it is with Galway’s housing shortage.

But Galway City Council would rather you, the public, didn’t know which businesses were profiting from poor unfortunates’ misery. Which is quite strange, given that you are paying for it.

Let us explain.

Regular readers of the Galway City Tribune know that the Council forks out €16,000 every month to house people who are so desperate they present at City Hall as ‘emergency homeless’.

Many of them have been turfed out of their homes because landlords hike up rents.

The local authority is statutorily obliged to put a roof over their heads. But because it doesn’t have enough Council houses, it goes to the private market.

The Council pays for them to stay in temporary accommodation such as hotels and B&Bs. It paid over €160,000 for the first 10 months of 2015.

We know this because it had to tell us following a Freedom of Information request.

What we don’t know is which B&Bs and hotels were used. We did ask, but the Council refused to tell. And so we appealed that decision and asked again. And they refused again.

Why do we need to know which businesses are benefitting from the housing shortage?

Aside from the obvious answer of ‘why not, sure it’s your money’, it is vital in terms of accountability and transparency that the public knows where and how its money is spent.

We’re not suggesting that anyone employed by the Council, or elected to it, owns a hotel or B&B and is supplying their services. But because they won’t tell us, we don’t know.

The Council said that by divulging this information it would “negatively impact” on the accommodation providers from a “financial/commercial” point of view.

Which in plain language means that if Joe Public found out that homeless people were staying at these hotels and B&Bs, it might damage their image.

And, their rationale goes, if that happened the hotels and B&Bs might not want to house the homeless any more, which would mean the Council would be in an awful predicament.

The Council doesn’t appear to have countenanced the fact that certain hotels and B&Bs would be queuing up to get a chunk of this €16,000 a month business. And they’d be quite happy if the public knew that they are housing homeless, albeit not for altruistic reasons alone.

Let’s not forget that some accommodation providers – and this is their right – made the Council seek alternative arrangements for some emergency homeless people during peak season of Race Week last year. That, we are told, was because the rooms were pre-booked.

Talk about having your cake and eating it. The Council’s mission statement mentions transparency but like so many of its policies, it remains an aspiration.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.