More than four million euro was spent on providing emergency accommodation to homeless people in Clare in the last five years.
60 percent of this spend was in the last two years alone.
Since February 2019, responsibility for the management of emergency accommodation here has been in the hands of Clare County Council’s Homeless Action Team.
Before that, anyone seeking emergency accommodation had to request an exceptional needs payment through the Department of Social Protection.
Just over €155,000 was spent on hotel and B & B accommodation for the homeless in this county in 2016.
By the end of 2019, that number had increased by more than nine fold to over €1.4 million euro.
Another one million was spent on private accommodation for those in need in 2020.
The expenditure has increased markedly in the past number of years, with just €25,000 euro – two and a half percent of last year’s figure – spent as recently as 2013.
72 people were documented as homeless in Clare by the Department of Housing at the end of February – the majority of these people are currently staying in emergency accommodation in Ennis.
