Focus Ireland has announced a new campaign to fight for the protection of homeless children.
Heartbreakingly, it has been reported that there are almost 3,500 children in Ireland being housed in emergency accommodation.
At the end of March of this year, 3,472 children were declared homeless and were living in emergency accommodation.
In response to these devastating figures, Focus Ireland has today launched a campaign for the ‘Best Interests of the Child’.
Speaking about the campaign on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland programme, Focus Ireland’s director of advocacy Mike Allen shared the charity’s determination to change laws to protect homeless children.
In particular, Mr Allen has called for reintroduction and passing of the Housing (Homeless Families) Bill 2017, which insists that local authorities must consider the ‘best interests of the child’ when deciding how to help each homeless family.
"Everybody knows that homelessness is a dreadful thing. Experiencing homelessness is a dreadful thing for anybody, man, woman or child, but particularly for children. It's an appalling experience,” Mr Allen explained on the radio.
He then went on to detail how difficult homelessness can be for any child. "The loss of their home is traumatic in the first place. Then emergency accommodation may be a long way from your school and there may be no place for doing homework. You can’t invite your friends around. You lose all that sort of social contact,” he noted.
“Obviously, there should be no homelessness,” Mr Allen added, before concluding that “while we have children who are homeless, we should be doing a much, much better job at protecting them from the harm that that causes.”
