Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0818 715 815. This is Live Line on RTÉ Radio 1.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Houban House in Dublin's homelessness crisis?
Yes, good afternoon. You are very welcome to LiveLine. 51551 is the number if you want to get in touch by text. You can email LiveLine at rte.ie or as always, give me a call on 0818 715 815. You are listening today to a very, very special edition of LiveLine. We're coming to you from room 210 on the second floor of Huben House.
Huben House is the largest family homeless hub in Ireland run by the Salvation Army. And room 210 is the home of Megan and her three children. And Megan, thanks a million for coming. inviting us into your home and speaking with us. How long have you been living here?
I've been living here since February, but I've been in emergency accommodations for years.
Okay. How many times in those three years have you had to move?
Seven or eight times.
God.
Yeah, it's been really tough.
So we might talk in a moment about the room, about where we are, but maybe give us a sense of what life is like. When you wake up with the three kids in the morning and you have three young kids, talk me through the routine, what time you're up and what happens.
Yeah, so we have to get up at six o'clock every morning. But my youngest child stays asleep while I dress her and put her into our pram. She's four. And then my middle son, he also stays asleep while I dress him, get him ready. And then my eldest daughter, nine, she gets up, gets herself ready. And then we're gone by seven o'clock. We're on the bus eating pancakes.
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Chapter 3: How does Megan describe her daily routine living in emergency accommodation?
It's just a room with a bed.
So these are old rooms for priests who were training seminarians. Yeah. So individual young priests.
Yeah.
To live in and it's a family home. I don't know how to describe it for people. Maybe size-wise, if people have been on holidays, it's like a mobile home or something, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah, it's like about the size of a mobile home, yeah.
How cramped does it get, four of you, in this space?
It's a lot, especially with my son having sensory processing disorder. So he will have an outburst if certain things are happening around him, which I can't control because we're all in the same room. So it's very difficult to like...
The point of these things when they were set up is that they're temporary.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do families face in emergency housing situations?
Did you think, right, this is three or six months and we'll get back on our feet? Yes.
I kind of had a feeling that we would be waiting a while. I just didn't think this long. I suppose I thought in my head maybe a year or two, but I wasn't actually thinking of that on a daily basis either way. Like even after the first year, I was exhausted, do you know? So, but this is year three now and I...
have had to come up i've had to go on antidepressants like stuff that i would never had to be on before this like so it's having a massive impact on my mental well-being and the kids to get me when did that start for you And that would have been around the time I would have been two years into my emergency accommodation. And I had to leave my job because I'm a single mother.
So I didn't get a lot of support and my accommodation didn't allow me to have visitors. So around about that time, I started to feel like just not good, you know.
Yeah. How do you feel today?
I just feel crap knowing that I don't have answers for me kids. I just don't know the end of this, when it's going to be, or if we're going to be moved again, or I don't know what tomorrow brings.
Yeah. So... Yeah, so it's, I mean... It's not so much where you're living, it's the uncertainty. Is that the worst thing about it, actually?
Yeah, like this hub is lovely, but it's just three years in now. This is an emergency accommodation. It shouldn't be for someone who's in homeless three years, like, you know, so.
Yeah, and again, I want people to have a sense of what is your home and... you know, there's communal spaces in the hub, but your home that you close your front door on, again, as we said, about the size of a mobile home, and where we're sitting is what we call it the living room area, and the two of us are on a two-seater sofa, and that's what it is.
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Chapter 5: How do children cope with the instability of living in a homeless hub?
It's almost like an automated response that everybody else gets and that's it. You're not seen as an individual person or anything. In individual family, you're seen as a number. And that's it, really.
What simple thing, I mentioned sitting down watching a movie, what simple thing that everybody takes for granted would you most look forward to having your own home?
Maybe just a movie night with the kids. Just being able to relax in our own space and know everything's okay, we're home, you know, all this is over now. Put this behind us.
Yeah. Well, again, for everybody listening, I think we'll hope the same for you. Thank you so much, Megan, for inviting us in.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, no, thank you. And to Room 210, we're on. If you're just joining us, we're... bringing a very special edition of the show to you today. We're in Huben House. It's run by the Salvation Army. It's the biggest family homeless hub in Ireland.
Over 300 people call this place home and some of them call it home for not just weeks or months, which was the plan when places like this opened, but they call it home
for years just one of the symptoms of a completely dysfunctional system we're going to talk more about places like this about the service they provide and we're going to hear from more people like Megan who are here and maybe count themselves on some level lucky to be here but they do not want to be here so we're going to hear more of that on the show a little bit later stay with us we'll be back in a moment
LiveLine with Kieran Cuddihy on RTÉ Radio 1.
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Chapter 6: What are the impacts of homelessness on children's mental health?
The properties are so scarce and what is available would cost an arm and a leg.
And then as people... live here longer and longer. The nature of the service probably changes as well. It's less kind of roof over their head. Let's get them out again. You've got kids who are growing up here. You've got kids with additional needs like Megan has as well. And there's got to be kind of services provided for them.
You've got people like Megan whose own mental health has deteriorated while she's been homeless. And, you know, there's wraparound services needed for all of that.
Yeah, so I think when people present, firstly, as homeless, you know, and they come in, obviously they have that fear, you know, and the stigma attached. When they get over that and they see the service, the kids start to enjoy it, that's when it's brilliant. You know, it could be a few months, the kids love the playground, knick-knacking on the doors. That's fantastic, like we all would do.
However... What starts to happen then is, as Megan touched on, a nine-year-old daughter. Imagine a nine-year-old daughter being here for five years. You're then 14. Imagine that period of your life, your development, your friends, the effect that would have on you, a negative effect bringing into your adulthood. You know, and I suppose...
Things that Megan then touched on in terms of when you're living in these facilities for a prolonged period, it has a knock-on effect, whether it's your mental health, whether you can't sustain your employment, you know, whether it turns to addiction, whatever it is, because of the pressure cooker in the prolonged period, this has a knock-on effect. which then leads to spiraling.
You know, it can, because it's very hard for someone to stay strong when they don't know there's a level of uncertainty every day. If I said to you, Ciarán, you're going to be here for one year, you'd say, okay, I'm going to work for that year, keep everything together. But when it's so uncertain of what tomorrow brings, I find that's when these things come out of control.
Yeah. The... The experience of seeing the kids grow up, what's that like? You must have seen them kids being carried in here and then they're skipping off themselves now to school every day, are they?
Well, I think we've assisted with them being birthed in here more, you know. Have you? No, we've had women come in pregnant, you know, and we'd be joking about it. Some of the staff are like a midwife sometimes, you know, if them incidents can occur. And unfortunately, we've seen babies come in a few weeks old
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Chapter 7: How does the community at Houban House support its residents?
But others are maybe not as good at it. And I'm sure you probably have to manage that as well. You know, that has to have an impact on staff. They befriend families here. And those families then, as Megan said, they get an email to say, sorry, your contract is up. You're moving to this service so long.
Yeah. that is a huge impact on staff, you know, especially when families are moved out or, as Anthony said, we had a family here and they moved out. They had been here for a couple of years and staff were heartbroken because not only do they have their key worker, you know, the rest of the staff actually linking it on with them. Everybody was heartbroken to see them moving out.
We have another family, they moved out and she came back a couple of days later to get some of her stuff and the little fella thought, you know, I'm going back home to my friends. Because this is where he'd grown up. This is where his friends were. The staff deal with the different issues. We do staff meetings every week. And we also link in with the staff.
If staff have an issue, they'll come and sit and talk to us, work through it. If they have a difficulty with one of their families, we'll all sit down as a team and we work this stuff out. Obviously, if there's something in their family that has impacted them, they'll come and they'll sit down and talk because... You know, not only are we here for the families, we're here for the staff as well.
We have to make sure that their well-being is OK, because if they're OK and they're happy, they'll do their job an awful lot better.
You've got, there's over 300 people living here.
361. 361.
You've got all of those kids and adults and different families. And, you know, as everybody's been saying, emotions can be fraught, understandably. How often... do you have to deal with that strife? You know, you mentioned even different nationalities as well that must play a part as well in it.
Yeah, they do get the occasions, you know, when there is conflict between two different nationalities. We sit down, we sit and we talk to them, you know, and resolve it. Because if it's resolved as soon as an issue happens, it means that it doesn't go on. So we'll sit down, the key workers will sit down with the families. If it can't be resolved, they need help from us as management.
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Chapter 8: What are the emotional tolls of living in emergency accommodation?
And trying to get the truth to the council would just be a nightmare because you're putting a hole there cut off. So you kind of stop doing that because you feel like you're wasting your time. So for now you're just kind of sitting around waiting to see what happens. But at the moment it looks like nothing is happening. And it's not going to be for a while.
So, you know, people would be familiar with the idea of being on the social housing waiting list and kind of very, very slowly moving along that list. But the choice-based letting... You know, it's great for people who get it, but one feature of it that strikes me as kind of unintentionally cruel is you probably get your hopes up, do you?
Every time you apply, you think maybe this will be the one.
Yeah, every time you apply, I think we have 60 applications we applied since we moved in here.
And that's 60 times you think this could be the house we get.
We got one reply back which stated that we were unfortunate, but the rest of them we don't even hear back. So you're applying, you're not getting an answer. So you're kind of just left, what's the point? You have to keep pushing yourself and keep yourself kind of sane to keep pushing. Other than that, you're kind of just left, you can nearly give up. Don't know what to do.
It affects your mental health a bit as well. We're all kind of struggling as a family. We just find it hard to keep every day, keep pushing yourself, keep going, get up, do what you need to do. But yet you're just going back to sitting around and wait. You can't do anything. It's just hard. What impact has it had on you? For me, I had to change work twice.
When I moved in, I had to change to go to nights. I thought it was good work. And then the baby then started school, which means I'm actually out of work at the moment because my partner's a manager. She's working full time. So I had to go to school with the kids. I couldn't do night shift and come in. So now I'm kind of really stuck sitting around doing nothing.
And mentally, it's taken a strain on me. There's no time, no time for yourself to go and do that because you're working around the hours of work. school and the kids to get them to do something. The stairs stuck as well.
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