On June 28, 2022, I sent what should have been a routine freedom of information (FOI) request to Dublin City Council, asking for the list of payments it had made to landlords in previous years. 

Last week, one thousand days later, The Currency was in a position to name the largest ultimate beneficiaries of the capital’s hundred-million-euro-plus private homeless accommodation industry. 

Some were already well-known landlords to the Department of Integration for the accommodation of international protection applicants and Ukrainian refugees. The figures released by the local authority revealed that their businesses also collected large payments to put a roof over the heads of homeless Dubliners.

Niall detailed two such examples: former Monaghan GAA manager Seámus “Banty” McEnaney and his family, who emerged as the largest private homeless accommodation provider in the capital; and the Coldec Group, which ranked third. He also examined planning files for the conversion of office space into emergency accommodation in the capital, showing that these landlords and others are only getting started in what appears to be an exponentially growing industry.

Figures compiled by the housing charity Focus Ireland last week show that public expenditure on private homeless emergency accommodation jumped again last year to hit €270 million nationwide. “In 2024, out of every €10 spent on homelessness, €7.50 went to for-profit organisations,” said Focus’s director of advocacy Mike Allen. This resulted from several unplanned policy moves.

The Government’s promise to stop using hotel rooms for this service turned out to mean the conversion of entire hotels into homeless accommodation. “They didn’t stop being used, they stopped being hotels,” Allen said. Charities were reluctant to grow short-term services, instead focusing on long-term support – with the exception of the Peter McVerry Trust, he added. “Emergency accommodation is crucial, but does nothing to deal with the underlying problem.”

Beyond the established players, the payments data released to The Currency revealed previously unknown business interests supported by the State’s increasing reliance on private landlords for emergency accommodation. Who has ever heard of the Forbairt group, which was paid €10 million for this service in 2023 alone? Or of 44-year-old Corkman Kieran Hayes, who assembled in just three years a portfolio generating millions of euro in annual revenue from the same source?

My FOI request to access these figures should have been routine for many reasons. The Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE), an office of Dublin City Council covering the whole of Co Dublin, increased its spending on privately owned emergency homeless accommodation to €142.9 million in 2023 from just €52.6 million in 2021, when Covid-19 protection measures such as a rent freeze and an eviction ban helped reduce the number of people in emergency accommodation.

These landlords provide a valuable service to society. Without access to their properties, thousands of people would currently be on the street. Yet there is no question that the public procurement of services on such a vast and fast-growing scale should be subject to scrutiny. 

This is even more evident now that the figures obtained by The Currency have shown the level of concentration among the most active landlords, with the McEnaney family alone collecting more than €100 million across homelessness and international protection annual payments for the first time in 2023. No contractor can expect to generate this level of business with the State without it being subject to full transparency.

Ample precedent

There was also ample precedent making the records of public payments to landlords accessible under FOI. 

Shortly before I submitted my request to Dublin City Council, the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) had ruled that I had the right to access payments to corporate landlords under the €500 million Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) scheme, managed for all local authorities by Limerick City and County Council.

The OIC rejected most arguments raised by the council to oppose my request, from GDPR to the claim that records did not exist. (There is no technical difficulty in releasing records of payments to landlords, as all public authorities must compile them for Revenue to run checks every year.)

Despite this, Dublin City Council rejected my first request for such records and lost when I appealed to the OIC. However, the council only informed me and the OIC late in the appeal process that it regarded DRHE records as separate from my request. The trick succeeded in having them excluded from the decision.

I introduced a new request, specifically including DRHE data and referencing the existing OIC decision. Through my research, I discovered that Dublin City Council had previously lost an OIC appeal against a similar request made in 2016 by journalist Mark Tighe. 

The council took a High Court challenge against the 2016 decision, which took until 2023 to decide while the judge waited for other FOI disputes to go through the Supreme Court. The legal action failed in 2023 and Dublin City Council released the figures to Tighe in 2024 for coverage in the Sunday Independent, albeit eight years late.

Despite this legal precedent, Dublin City Council still refused to release more recent DRHE records to me until the OIC again found against it on January 15 this year.

All exemptions dismissed

The decision dismissed all exemptions from freedom of information claimed by the council. It was “not apparent” that disclosing the names and payments of landlords would undermine the DRHE’s position in future negotiations, the OIC investigator found. 

Dublin City Council argued that the information was commercially sensitive because it would unveil the DRHE’s position when conducting new deals with landlords. “It is simply not apparent to me how its disclosure could prejudice the conduct or outcome of contractual or other negotiations by the council. Again, I note the records contain only the name of the vendor and the total amount paid to them in 2022 and do not contain a breakdown as to what this amount was for,” the OIC investigator found.

In an extraordinary argument, the DRHE also relied on a potential FOI exemption on grounds of “law enforcement and public safety”. Its deputy director John Durkan, supported in a subsequent internal review by director Mary Hayes, wrote to me: “I am satisfied that given all of the recent high-profile instances of arson against premises identified or about to become accommodation for either people seeking asylum or people experiencing homelessness, that releasing such details could lead to similar attacks on an identified premises.”

I made the point that this amounted to accepting that criminals had become the ones to decide on the application of FOI legislation.

The OIC accepted that my request did not include the addresses of any premises and rejected the DRHE’s argument, stating: “It referred to ‘high-profile’ instances of arson against certain premises and while I accept that there have been widely reported cases of attacks on premises on the basis that they had been identified as accommodation, or potential accommodation, or even suspected accommodation of international protection applicants, I am not aware of equivalent attacks on premises identified as accommodating individuals or families experiencing homelessness.”

The decision established that the council had failed to establish the basis of any exemption from FOI, and it was not even necessary to balance any such restrictions against the public interest of media scrutiny.

In a significant precedent, the OIC also decided that it was not necessary to consult landlords. This was based on my previous appeal concerning HAP records, where the OIC consulted around 100 landlords before ordering the release of records. Very few landlords objected, and their objections were rejected. 

Finally, the OIC remarked that it had repeatedly found against Dublin City Council in the previous 18 months in cases concerning FOI access to homeless accommodation records. “I would urge the Council to have regard to the findings and commentary contained in these decisions when making decisions on any similar new FOI requests that it may receive,” the investigator wrote.

The DRHE finally relented and last month released records of payments to landlords for 2022 and, without further difficulty, in answer to a new request for 2023.

No transparency in procurement

Freedom of information was the only route to access this data because the procurement process adopted by the DRHE offers no transparency into the contracts awarded.

“The DRHE developed a procurement strategy in 2021 and the Emergency Accommodation tender went live on the E-Tender platform in February 2022, this remained active for two years and was re-issued in June 2024 for a further two-year period. DRHE runs a number of procurements which are fully advertised on the Irish Government procurement website – www.etenders.gov.ie,” a spokesperson for the agency told me. 

However, the winning contractors and the value of their contracts are not disclosed. On a rare occasion, in October 2023, Dublin City Council published a contract award notice on the EU’s official tenders website for the €86.6 million deal it had struck with the Coldec Group for the use of Hatch Hall for 10 years. 

The disclosure occurred only because the deal was so out of line with the normal course of procurement that it had to be regularised after the fact. In the process, the DRHE admitted that its sourcing of private emergency accommodation was very much a landlord’s market in the “absence of competition”.

“All those with suitable facilities are in fact being awarded contracts,” the notice said, insisting that this was legal.

Double standards

Scrutiny of privately owned homeless accommodation is also important because, unlike the supported services traditionally provided by charities, landlords have been held to lower standards.

Organisations like the Peter McVerry Trust, the Dublin Simon Community, DePaul and others have the exact amount of state funding they receive for each of their locations published by the Department of Housing. 

They must also comply with the 54-page National Quality Standards Framework for Homeless Services in Ireland. Inspectors may check their performance against criteria ranging from health and safety to governance and recruitment.

Initial contracts with private landlords weren’t subject to any standards or inspections. This changed in 2022 when a seven-page set of Quality Standards – Providers of Private Emergency Accommodation was developed for Dublin. Although it follows the same themes as the standards applicable to charities, its detailed requirements are much lighter.

“As part of the DRHE’s commitment to continually improve of the quality of services available to families and single adults experiencing homelessness, Dublin City Council has engaged an independent contractor for the delivery of a Homeless Accommodation Inspection Service at centres within the Dublin region. The DRHE publishes the reports quarterly, which have been compiled by Eamon O’Boyle and Associates,” the agency’s spokesperson said.

The published inspection reports are detailed and thorough, but they are anonymised. They do not reveal which charity or landlord might be responsible for any failings, unlike checks on nursing homes by the Health Information and Quality Authority, for example.

Have the double standards in requirements and scrutiny resulted in lower costs at privately sourced emergency accommodation? This may have been the case up until 2022, when private landlords accommodated 58 per cent of adults in this category but received a slightly lower proportion of emergency accommodation funding, at 57 per cent.

In 2023, however, 62 per cent of homeless adults were in private emergency accommodation while their landlords received 65 per cent of payments under this heading, overtaking higher-standard charity-run services on a cost-per-person basis.

More than ever, transparency is a glaring need in this ever-growing, taxpayer-funded industry.

Elsewhere this week…

Set down for nine weeks at trial, in the end, the bitter dispute between the shareholders of Web Summit was done and dusted in seven days, two of which were spent in intense settlement negotiations. Francesca reported on the cessation of hostilities between Paddy Cosgrave and his former friends and colleagues, Daire Hickey and David Kelly. Reflecting on the case, Tom argued that Cosgrave has spent tens of millions pursuing and settling a court case he should have dealt with out of court sooner. 

“If he had better judgment, Cosgrave could have settled this case four years ago for a fraction of what he is now paying. This is what I told him in 2021 when he asked to meet me in a coffee shop in Dublin 6 in order to air his grievances about his former pals,” Tom wrote.  “Cosgrave ignored me as he did many others. Cosgrave talks a lot. But I wonder if he really listens.”

One of Ireland’s most high-profile chefs, Anna Haugh, spoke to Michael about the dangers of chains moving into the country, the prospect of unification, and raising her son in a time when adolescence has been put into sharp relief.

Irrepressible publisher Ian Hyland has just acquired one of Ireland’s best-known media brands Windmill Lane Pictures. He spoke to Tom about how it fits within his stable which also includes Business & Finance and Quartet Books.

The existence of a Revenue audit was not disclosed when an interim examinership was first pursued in court last November for Boylan Print. A company director maintained this was “inadvertent” and not down to bad faith.

As Francesca reported last week, the Circuit Court in Dublin has now approved a scheme of arrangement that will see new investment pumped into the company and save 61 jobs at the firm.