"the highly competitive world of the homelessness charities!"

The comments on the Peter McVerry Trust's accounts contain some inaccuracies.

Their social housing provision is funded almost entirely by the government's Capital Assistance Scheme which funds sheltered housing for people who need housing and support services. It is not funded by borrowing. This level of grant funding in large probably explains the high level of government spending on the trust. One million euro buys three properties nowadays folks, or maybe four in the case of PMT which specialises in buying run down inner city houses and renovating them.

The Trust specialises in housing very vulnerable formerly homeless people many of whom have addictions, are former prisoners or have had other adverse life experiences. It provides homeless hostel accommodation for these people and also social housing for them to move into (around 1100 homes) This client group needs support in order to maintain their tenancy, just giving them a key to a house and letting get on with it is not enough. This requires staff to provide these supports.

In response to the comment that there are just 70 people sleeping rough in Dublin. There are over 12,000 people in state funded emergency accommodation for homeless people. The costs of keeping them in this very poor quality accommodation are huge - €215 million last year - and this is just the cost of the accommodation, the personal costs to these people and the indirect costs to the state in terms of extra health spending, educational support, crime, drug addiction are incalculable but probably atomical. It is a much cheaper and also more humane solution to fund the PMT to accommodate them.
 
How many of those 12,000 are placed in hotels, or government social housing or hubs?

The vast vast majority in that number aren't "very vulnerable", aren't sleeping rough, or likely to be, and it just muddies the waters to conflate the two types of situations and to talk of all those problems and then the 12,000 number as if they were 'very vulnerable'.
 
As far as I know around 2/3rds of homeless people live in private emergency accommodation like hotels and B N Bs. The vast majority of those in this accommodation are families with children. Some of them have support needs but many don't and are generally homeless because their private rented tenancy was ended. They also tend to get housed faster because most of the council housing stock consists of three bedroom houses suitable for this cohort and private landlords are more willing to house them.

Around 35-40 per cent of homeless people are single adults (mainly men) living in homeless hostels. Not all of these would have support needs of course and many just use the hostels for short term emergency accommodation and then disappear out of the hostel system - either they move our of Dublin or Ireland, resolve accommodation or mend a family dispute and move home. However a proportion are totally entrenched in homelessness, they live long term in hostels, sleep rough or move in and out of hostels over the long term. This is the group on which the government's Housing First strategy is focused. It tries to give these people housing asap + supports so they can manage to live independently successfully. The Peter McVerry Trust is the main agency delivering this strategy, to my knowledge it is delivering approx. 60 per cent of the Housing First accommodation.

On a side note all the core services of all major homeless bodies (Focus Ireland, PMV, Novas, Simon Communities) are almost entirely funded by government and I don't have a problem with that. The state has no capacity whatsoever to deliver these services, indeed it would be far more expensive to employ permanent and pensionable public servants to do this work and a lot of the NGOs have a lot of expertise. What I object to is all the fundraising these NGOs engage in. The public don't realise this money isn't spent on frontline services, it is spend on 'advocacy', nice to have services and of course on fundraising itself. Rather the public think they are having to fund the vital work of these 'poor charities' because the government won't do so. This isn't true.
 
I have a big problem with the attitude the McVerry Trust has to the Gardai and how their staff refuse to cooperate when criminal activity is taking place in their hostel and properties. I also have a big problem with how they let active drug users stay in their hostels, making an already dangerous situation more dangerous.

Why would it be far more expensive? The employees of the charities have the same pay scales and terms and conditions. If the State did it directly there would be economies of scale. The solution to "the State is inefficient" isn't to use public money to pay someone else to do the job that the State should be doing, the solution is to restructure things so that the State is efficient.

I agree with that. I don't donate to any charities in the homeless industry as they are political lobby groups and will use my money to push a political and social ideology that I am fundamentally opposed to.
 
Looks like this can be solved with more tax payers money. We need to make sure the Trust owns a lot of property paid for by the tax payer who will own nothing.

And let's not discuss the dumb idea to do away with bedsits. At least they won't be blaming us bad landlords for this latest mess. Because charities are good and landlords are bad. Everybody should have a 5 star accommodation, right in the center of the city and the charitites are best placed to provide that. The tax payer who is footing the bill will happily continue to commute in from Virginia in Cavan or Enfield in Meath (Kilkenny/Carlow.) Places they can afford to live in.

We even had a thread started by last week about a 4 bed in Galway where the owners were a shocking 35 minute walk from Eyre Square. Where Creamegg pointed out there is affordable housing if you looked.
 
I think it was you @Bronte who said that we've replaced the Catholic Church with Charities as the unquestionable sources of moral guidance.
I'm not a fan of blind faith in anything and my first instinct with charities who act as political and moral pressure groups is to look behind the curtain.
 
A good factual based article in today's Irish Times

Financial crisis hits homeless charity Peter McVerry Trust after years of growth

Fears that the Dublin charity could collapse follows more than a decade of rapid expansion responding to homelessness crisis
www.irishtimes.com

The trust has more than 700 frontline staff and provides emergency homeless accommodation to more than 2,000 people each night.

It also runs the Housing First programme, which moves people out of long-term homelessness into their own tenancies, while providing support to help them deal with addiction, mental health or other challenges.

Around three quarters of the charity’s funding comes from State bodies, with the rest largely made up from donations.

The crisis has arisen due to “mismanagement” – rather than financial wrongdoing – and the trust not having proper structures in place as it grew, one senior source in homeless services said.

If the trust collapsed, other homeless and housing charities in the sector would not have the capacity to take over its services, the source added.

Fr McVerry himself put the current problems down to the charity trying to do too much and expanding too quickly.

In 2021, the charity planned to triple the amount of housing it had, from 600 units to 1,800 over five years.

In the two previous years it had spent more than €20 million buying properties for use as social housing, according to its annual reports.

A source familiar with internal crisis talks in the charity said part of the problem was it had paid for properties from its own finances at times, rather than borrowing money, which had eaten into resources.

Ramping up the amount of social housing run by the charity would have come with significant staffing costs, according to one source in another large homeless charity.

On other occasions the State has funded the trust’s property purchases, only to have plans to open homeless accommodation run aground.

The charity bought two properties in 2021, Latchfords Townhouse, a former boutique hotel on Lower Baggot Street, and the adjoining building, to turn into homeless accommodation for 74 people.

The guide price was €5 million but the trust bought it for €6 million, with the DRHE funding the purchase.

The charity failed to secure a planning exemption to use all floors for homeless accommodation. To date the site has remained unused, save for a Chinese restaurant operating from the ground floor.
 
It looks as if they have just grown too fast without having the finances in place.

If it were a business, it would be called "overtrading".

I have no doubt that they have provided a good service for their thousands of clients at a cost much lower than it would cost if Dublin City Council provided it directly.

That does not mean that I agree with all of its actions, decisions, policies and lobbying.

Brendan
 
The only charity I donate to is the capuchin centre. Beit the McVery trust or the likes of Simon , the majority of them are overly politicised
 
Irony of that is that so many of the charities in question are Catholic in origin. Peter Mcverry trust is just one but some are not always so obvious, Merchant Quay being a case in point on the latter.
 
Why is that ironic?

I was educated by the Christian Brothers. As an atheist, I am grateful to them although I am sure I did not feel it or express it at the time.

I have received great medical treatment over the years in St. Vincent's Hospital.

Like a lot of services in Ireland which were not provided adequately or at all, the religious orders filled the gaps with a large part of it on a voluntary basis, at least, initially.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Why is that ironic?
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Maybe because they claim to have a mandate from Heaven to tell everyone how to live and derive from that the unquestionable right to judge others.
Maybe because they claim to be the originators of morality and deem those who do not believe in a higher power as fundamentally lesser moral beings.

Brendan Burgess said:
I was educated by the Christian Brothers. As an atheist, I am grateful to them although I am sure I did not feel it or express it at the time.
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So was I. They educated me using Public Money. If they weren't getting paid then they wouldn't have been there.
Brendan Burgess said:
I have received great medical treatment over the years in St. Vincent's Hospital.
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Also provided using Public Money.
Brendan Burgess said:
Like a lot of services in Ireland which were not provided adequately or at all, the religious orders filled the gaps with a large part of it on a voluntary basis, at least, initially.
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The RC Church filled the void vacated by the British Establishment and their Victorian didactic and paternalistic views on the poor. They took that position and that power and abused it in ways that are hard to fathom.
 
Purple said:
The RC Church filled the void vacated by the British Establishment and their Victorian didactic and paternalistic views on the poor.
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Did the Catholic church take over any school or hospital anywhere in Ireland that had previously been run by the British state? I'm genuinely struggling to think of any.

Victorian didacticism and paternalism certainly didn't die out with the Victorians and was/is never a particularly Catholic trait either.
 
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T McGibney said:
Did the Catholic church take over any school or hospital anywhere in Ireland that had previously been run by the British state? I'm genuinely struggling to think of any.
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I don’t know. Why do you ask?
T McGibney said:
Victorian didacticism and paternalism certainly didn't die out with the Victorians
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True.
T McGibney said:
and was/is never a particularly Catholic trait either.
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I’d have to completely disagree with you there.
 
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