As strategy to end youth homelessness reaches end, many of its promises remain unfulfilled

Last June, a young woman leaving state care applied to Dublin City Council for social housing – but she has yet to get any response, Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan says.

He raised her case with council managers and found out that other care-leavers who applied for social housing also hadn’t received responses, Doolan says.

“Their applications were frozen,” he said at a meeting of the council’s housing committee on Monday. “And are currently in a pile in the housing department.”

Despite the fact that the council’s scheme for deciding who gets social housing first and fastest says young people leaving care should be prioritised.

This, says Doolan, is “because of the trauma they have been through and their complex needs”.

And yet, some young people who recently aged out of state care are sofa surfing, says Doolan. Others are on the streets or in emergency accommodation, he says.

“I’m outraged that some of the most vulnerable people in our community … their applications aren’t even deemed necessary to be processed,” he said

As the latest three-year national strategy “working towards ending homelessness for young people aged 18-24” heads into its last year, most of the “actions” it promised have yet to be actioned.

There are 27 actions promised under the Youth Homelessness Strategy 2023 to 2025. A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said seven have been completed so far, and the rest will be completed this year.

Meanwhile, the number of people aged 18–24 staying in emergency accommodation increased by 33 percent, from 980 in November 2022, to 1,304 in November 2024.

Preventing homelessness

The 27 actions in the youth homelessness strategy are grouped into three sections: those to prevent youth homelessness, those to improve the experiences of young people in emergency accommodation, and those to help young people exit homelessness.

To keep them from becoming homeless, the strategy focuses on improving services for six cohorts of young people who are at risk of homelessness.

Young people with disabilities, young parents, young Travellers, LGBTQ+ young people, young people coming out of prison, and care leavers, are all high-risk for homelessness, it says.

The state has a special responsibility to young people in care, as it is supposed to be fulfilling the role of their parents. And yet, many young people leave the care of this “parent” and go straight into homelessness.

Tusla reported last year that its aftercare service was aware of 36 care leavers aged 18 to 22 living in “supported lodgings,” while a further 243 were in “other” accommodation. The “other” category includes homeless accommodation.

“We’ve been quite taken aback in the past about how little information there is on care leavers,” says Stephen Moffatt, the national policy manager with the children’s charity Barnardos.

At Monday’s meeting of the council’s housing committee, Mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE), said that each year Tusla notifies Dublin City Council of approximately 20 to 25 young people leaving care who are at risk of becoming homeless.

But the council also had agreed in its scheme for social housing allocations that care leavers could apply for priority for social housing. It got so many applications under this that it struggled to process them all, Hayes said.

These included applications from people who had left the care system years ago, and some from other counties, said Hayes.

Hayes said that the council will need to change its rules for allocating social housing again.

“No one is trying to remove the priority for care leavers, we are just trying to refine it back to the original target group,” she says, “because we won’t be able to meet it if it is completely open-ended.”

They intend to go back to taking their referrals from Tusla, who work with care leavers through their aftercare system, Hayes said. “They will prioritise the people who are immediately at risk of homelessness and who are the most vulnerable.”

An existing protocol between Tusla and local authorities, in place since 2014, says that council staff should meet with the people leaving care and help with their housing applications.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said it is currently consulting on a new protocol between Tusla and the local authorities to try and stem the flow of young care leavers into homeless services.

Updating the protocol on young people leaving care is one of the 27 actions in the Youth Homelessness Strategy 2023 to 2025. The “timeline” listed for that is “Q1 2024”.

“The first consultation phase is now complete and the second consultation phase will commence in the coming weeks,” says the spokesperson. “It is anticipated that the updated Protocol will issue in Q1 2025.”

Emergency accommodation

The strategy also includes an objective to improve the experience of young people who do become homeless, and need to use emergency accommodation.

“It is acknowledged that many young people feel that standard emergency accommodation is unsafe and unsuitable,” says a spokesperson for the Department of Housing.

This is “largely due to sharing a space with people of different ages who may be long-term users of homeless services and who may have complex mental health or addiction issues”.

There are a few hostels aimed specifically at young people. The strategy planned to add more of these to the system.

The DRHE opened “57 new youth specific beds have opened in the Dublin Region, 35 male & 22 female”, said a spokesperson.

The Department of Housing wrote to council managers in November 2024 to remind them that 2025 is the last year of the strategy, says the spokesperson.

It asked the councils to carry out their actions. “This can include the development of further youth-specific emergency accommodation,” says the spokesperson.

Exiting homelessness

Siobhán Merriman-Breuer, a policy officer with Focus Ireland, and the chair of the Irish Coalition to End Youth Homelessness, said the youth homelessness strategy has worked in some ways.

It has opened up good lines of communication between homeless NGOs and the relevant government departments – namely the Department of Housing and the Department of Children, she said.

And Supported Housing for Youth has been the success story of the strategy so far, she says. “The main positive outcome is that we know we can do that,” she says.

It is a “housing first”-type programme for young people, which provides them with a home together with “wraparound supports”, says the Department of Housing spokesperson.

The DRHE has delivered 25 new homes for young people under Supported Housing for Youth, as a pilot project, starting last year, according to the Department of Housing spokesperson.

Merriman-Breuer, of the Irish Coalition to End Youth Homelessness, said she would like to see that pilot project rolled out on a much bigger scale.

Lack of housing

“There are a lot of positive recommendations in the strategy,” says Moffatt, of Barnardos, “But there is just not enough accommodation.”

One of the problems the council had in prioritising care leavers for social housing is that it just didn’t have the homes to allocate to them, said Hayes, director of the DRHE, at Monday’s housing meeting.

The council had planned to get a supply of homes for care leavers under a national government scheme called Capital Assistance Scheme (CAS) for Care Leavers, she said.

But the approved housing bodies (AHBs) tasked with securing the homes for that scheme struggled to do so, Hayes said.

There was a problem with the funding “which they have raised repeatedly with the Department in relation to the funding of the scheme and needing a review”, she said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said by email that there’s no shortage of funding under the CAS scheme. “There is no instance where Careleavers projects been refused by the Department due to lack of CAS funding,” he said.

Mike Allen, director of advocacy at Focus Ireland, one of the AHBs working on that scheme, says it was difficult to secure the homes.

Firstly there is a shortage of one-bedroom homes, Allen says. And then the price limits on what the state would pay for them through the scheme were low compared to market rates, he said.

“You can negotiate flexibility, but by the time that is negotiated the home has been sold,” he says.

On top of that, AHBs seeking to purchase homes for the CAS for Care Leavers scheme are competing with other charities trying to buy housing for the Housing First scheme for homeless adults, says Allen.

In those cases the councils are prioritising the Housing First scheme over the CAS for Care Leavers, he says. “Obviously a balance needs to be struck between the two of them but at the moment there is no balance.”

Allen says that the pilot project for supported housing for youth was successful because the AHB involved, Clúid, built the homes for that project.

“It shows that a more integrated collaboration with the approved housing body is the approach needed,” he says.

There isn’t much point in launching schemes if you don’t know where you are going to get the housing from, he says.

After the strategy ends

“We need more time and we need to take the current learnings from the strategy,” says Merriman-Breuer. “The hope would be that we would have a new strategy in 2026.”

Meanwhile, Doolan says he still has questions about the care leavers who applied to Dublin City Council for social housing but have not got any response.

How many social housing applications from care leavers are sitting on desks in Dublin City Council without having been processed? he asks.

When was the decision taken to not prioritise care leavers, and why were councillors on the housing committee not informed? he asks.

“Some of these people have been continuously let down and are carrying a lot of trauma,” he says.

UPDATE: This article was updated at 15.22 on 29 Jan. 2025 with comments from a Department of Housing spokesperson in response to DHRE director Mary Hayes’s comments about difficulties getting CAS funding.