Mayo mother feeling stress of Christmas homelessness for newborn child
"I am homeless, living in a friend's house. I've just had my first baby. She's now a month old. She was born at 36 weeks.
"I've been in and out of hospital the whole of the pregnancy with stress and anxiety.
“I developed diabetes also. I was rushed to a Dublin hospital for a week from bleeding and pains.
"I had a terrible experience. A lot of this stress has been brought on because of my homeless situation."
These distressing words have been written to a Mayo TD by a mother suffering the strain of being without a home of her own following the arrival of her firstborn.
In response to the correspondence, Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh has appealed to An Taoiseach Micheál Martin to issue upfront funding to Mayo County Council "in order that it can turn around the vacant properties they have without having to go through the bureaucratic nightmare of applying for funding from central government on a house-by-house, unit-by-unit basis."
The Erris-based representative asked: "Can the Taoiseach imagine what it is like to be a homeless person in Mayo watching council houses remain empty month after month while nothing is done?"
Replying, Mr. Martin outlined: “There is no reason why voids should take so long.
“There has to be some framework of control for the department.
"We discovered recently with the tenant in situ scheme that houses were being bought with people living in them. Those houses are bought by councils and suddenly there is €80,000 or €100,000 going into the house.
"The original objective of that was to stop people going into homelessness. When a local authority house becomes vacant, unless there is something majorly wrong structurally, it should be occupied within a month.
"We have given huge money to local authorities for voids over the past five years. They should get on with it.
"They let the houses lie idle for too long. It is inexcusable. In some councils, there is inertia. I have seen it.
“People leave very good houses for one reason or another, the shutters go up and the houses are left there for three or four months. Those houses should be reoccupied once the electrics and everything else are grand.
"If we have to get around to repairing them, we can at least give someone the house. That is my view.
“I get impatient about it from time to time, to be honest. If you give an upfront grant, there is no guarantee it will be spent on voids, and that is the problem."