Several emergency hostels in Dublin could close in coming months as the Homeless Agency Partnership implements a new strategy. This is supposed to aim at increasing the number of people who can gain access to long-term housing with supports provided in their own home.
Cedar House in Marlborough Street, which provides short-term emergency shelter in Dublin City Centre, will be the first facility to lose funding under the new government plan.
This is a bad decision.
Homelessness in Dublin is a fact. Pretending homelessness is not there will not make it go away. Closing an emergency shelter will mean people trying to sleep on the streets, which impacts on all the people of the city as well as the homeless people themselves.
Street homelessness has a negative effect shopkeepers, tourism and ordinary people trying to go about their business, as well as having appalling effects on the health and well being of the homeless themselves. Closing a shelter makes a bad situation worse.
I support calls for the shelter to remain open. I want to applaud the staff and their union representatives for campaigning to keep this important facility open, and for all the hard work they do. The decision to close this shelter should be reversed.
