Sir, – I have the honour of knowing a lovely, lively 11-year-old boy. As the packing cases pile up in the house he has stopped eating, started to cry regularly and become listless and despondent. His family are losing their house for the second time. He knows what it is to be homeless. In an effort to avoid this fate yet again, in the last five months his mother has answered about 150 rental ads and viewed 80 houses in Co Dublin. To no avail. I wish the members of the Government could witness the stressed, heartbreaking scenes of a family being put out of their home and having nowhere to go. I would like to think that if they did, they would declare a housing emergency, remember that the right to private property in the Constitution is conditioned by the public good and implement some of the measures recommended to them by organisations working with homeless people, instead of the piecemeal, ineffective measures that have led to over 3,000 children in homelessness, suffering the same trauma as my young friend. Why are the homeless and about-to-become homeless people not prioritised in the budget? They get up early in the morning, too, to escort their children the long distances from their emergency accommodation to their schools. – Yours, etc,
MOLLY O’DUFFY,
Broadstone,
Dublin 7.