State's spending on emergency accommodation for homeless people soars over past decade
Focus Ireland's 'Focus on Homelessness' series shows that despite expenditure on emergency accommodation ballooning since 2014, there has been 'little investment in prevention and long-term solutions'. File picture
State expenditure on emergency accommodation exploded in the last decade, with €361m spent in 2024, representing 86% of all homelessness funding last year, according to a new report.
The latest study from Focus Ireland in its 'Focus on Homelessness' series shows that despite expenditure on emergency accommodation ballooning since 2014, there has been “little investment in prevention and long-term solutions”.
The €361m spent last year itself represented a jump of 26% on the €287m spent in 2023 as more and more people entered homelessness for the first time.
Meanwhile, the report shows that the vast majority of expenditure on emergency accommodation is paid out to purely for-profit entities as opposed to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Roughly €270m was paid out to businesses providing that accommodation last year.
The launch of the report heard that the only NGO which has grown its funding in terms of the provision of emergency accommodation in recent years is the Peter McVerry Trust, an entity which has been plagued by issues surrounding its governance and financial mismanagement over the past 18 months.
The report from Focus Ireland found that only 5% of homeless funding paid out by the State in 2024 was spent on the prevention of homelessness, compared with 10% in 2013. The number of households in emergency accommodation increased by 258% over the same time period.
The report also found that more than €1.84bn has been spent on emergency accommodation over the past decade. In 2014, less than 1,000 people were in emergency accommodation for more than six months on average. That figure is now more than 6,000.
Focus Ireland director of advocacy Mike Allen described the report’s findings as showing that the State’s approach in general to homelessness has been "reactive", with the Government having “constantly underestimated the scale of the challenge”.
While for-profits are a “crucial part of the solution”, he said, that sector provides accommodation only, and that’s “the most passive intervention”.
To suggest the figures indicate that homelessness has been “privatised” in Ireland is “very simplistic”, he added. “A number of factors have driven this, none of them planned.”
