Dublin councils are to look at buying or building homeless hostels

Councils in the Dublin region are looking at whether they should change tack, and buy or build facilities for homeless accommodation rather than rent them as they often do at the moment.

“This is not a plan to end homelessness in Dublin, regrettably,” said Mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) on Tuesday, as she presented the new draft homeless action plan to councillors. 

Instead, she is pitching councils buying and possibly building more homeless accommodation, she said, because they’re spending too much on private providers.

“We have an over-reliance on the private sector. It is expensive, it is poor value for money,” says Hayes. The council is currently renting 70 percent of hostels privately, she said. 

Most councillors agreed that the council should consider its options.

“I understand why you don’t want to go down the route where local authorities are running homeless accommodation,” said independent Councillor Cieran Perry at the meeting. “But I think the state has to step in at this stage.”

At the moment, the council often puts out calls for homeless accommodation, and rents it from private landlords who respond.

Renting or leasing isn’t cheap, though. Consider Avalon House on Aungier Street, where the council has agreed to pay more than €100,000 a year in rent for each family it plans to accommodate there.

Eoin Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson, said that in some cases, the DRHE is paying as much as €180,000 per year for a large family in private emergency accommodation.

“The prudent thing would be to build,” says Ó Broin.

But the move also shows that the council staff don’t expect homelessness to get better soon, he said.

The new homeless plan

Over the last homeless action plan, which ran from 2022 to 2024, homelessness increased by 2,197 households, said Hayes at the meeting. 

That meant a jump from 4,015 households in January 2022 to 6,212 households in December 2024. 

At the same time, the DRHE has been working to improve standards, she says. 

It ramped up inspections, carrying out 568 unannounced checks, says Hayes. Dublin Fire Brigade has been checking for fire safety in hostels too, she said. 

The homeless action plan, which is updated every three years, has to be agreed on by all four Dublin region councils before it is published. 

To draw up the new plan, Hayes says that the DRHE consulted councillors, homeless charities, other public bodies and homeless service users. 

Homeless people said they find homeless services infantilising, and that they are worried about support workers in hostels getting burned out, she said. 

Some people felt hopeless about ever moving out of homelessness, she said. 

“There is that age-old problem of having to relay their traumatic experience to multiple staff,” says Hayes. 

Included in the plan are moves to improve standards, improve hostels for children and to focus on moving people out of homelessness, she said. 

Seventy percent of emergency accommodation is operated by private providers, said Hayes at the meeting. 

“So we really needed to bridge the gap between the traditional supported accommodation provided by the NGOs, and what was happening in private emergency [accommodation],” she says.

To help bridge this gap, DRHE and homeless charities provide health, housing and social supports in private hostels, she said. 

DRHE also needs to stop people becoming homelessness in the first place, she says – because any accommodation is cheaper than emergency accommodation.

People want routes out of homelessness, she says. “We want to see that there is a move-on culture throughout services.” 

Hayes said that is more challenging than before because fewer people are moving into private-rental housing through the housing assistance payment scheme. 

Hayes says she wants to incorporate feedback from service users into service delivery going forward. “We have not been great at including peers or people who have lived experience in our service planning,” she says. 

People are saying that they feel unsafe in emergency accommodation. DRHE needs to look at ways to tackle that, she says. 

DRHE is also trying to open more emergency accommodation outside of the city centre, in other parts of Dublin, she says. 

“We need a balance of emergency accommodation across the four Dublins,” she said. “We have been working really hard on that in the last year.”

DRHE recently opened facilities in South Dublin County Council and Fingal County Council areas, she said. 

Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney asked at the meeting if anything more could be done to reduce the impact of homelessness on children. 

Hayes said that Tusla is going to devise programmes for children in homeless accommodation. 

Also, DRHE will make sure future contracts include internet access in all family hostels she says, as kids need the internet for homework. 

Exploring council hostels

There is very little affordable housing of any tenure, said Hayes. 

Homeless charities are stretched, which makes it difficult to scale-up programmes that aim to house the long-term homeless, like Housing First, she said. 

“I would rather focus on moving people from shelters to housing,” says Hayes, but when there are people desperate for emergency accommodation, the council has to respond to that need.

The new homeless plan suggests, for the first time, that councils should buy or build homeless facilities themselves. Hayes pitched it – while saying that she has mixed feelings. 

“My own feeling and the general experience with emergency accommodation is if you build it, you will fill it,” she says. 

But the council has to consider doing that because it is spending too much money on private providers, she says. 

“Really, that is exploring whether we have alternative options for providing emergency accommodation, that are not based on the private sector,” she says.

The move would deliver better value for money and better quality or it won’t go ahead, she says. 

Hayes didn’t indicate who would run the hostels if the council owned the building. 

Mick Mulhern, the city council’s housing manager, said that any hostels built would be in addition to homes. 

Councillors were mostly in favour of the move. 

Although Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney did say she was concerned temporary measures could become permanent, like schools in prefabs. 

On the phone on Thursday, Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney, who chairs the housing committee, said the council will consider its options. “If it's more cost-effective, let's look at it.” 

One of the Dublin region councils is looking at modular or volumetric building for homeless facilities, said Heney, and any decision on that would come back before councillors. 

Louisa Santoro, CEO of the Mendicity Institution, a homeless day centre, says the council should consider buying buildings already used as hostels. 

“There must be enough premises currently in use that they could make an offer, so you wouldn’t have any interruption in service,” she says.

That is obviously better value than renting long-term. “Ultimately, you have a bricks and mortar asset,” says Santoro. 

She isn’t convinced that the council could build facilities quickly, she says.

Also, the council would need to resource and staff a maintenance department for hostels, if it buys a number of them, she says. They also need to consider how they are going to run the facilities properly, in a fully transparent and regulated way. 

Social Democrats Councillor Mary Callaghan says the council should consider directly delivering facilities to improve building quality. Some of the buildings in use are not suitable, she says.

Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD, says that publicly owned hostels should provide better standards. 

“Obviously, it would make much more sense to have publicly owned, good-quality emergency accommodation both for singles and families,” he says. 

If it was done right it could mean single rooms for single people, sufficient rooms for couples and better facilities for families, he says. 

But, he says, the move indicates that the homeless problem is  expected to worsen, he says. 

“It does highlight the fact that the people at the front line in Dublin City Council are of the view that this problem is not getting any smaller,” he says.