According to the latest figures, there are over 1300 children homeless in Ireland - a massive 50% increase from the beginning of the year.

Many of these children are living in unsuitable emergency accommodation, sometimes for months on end. In extreme cases, and we saw one earlier this week, they have even been forced to sleep rough on our streets.

Focus Ireland, who work with families who have lost their homes, have been running excursions and day trips for families as means of offering them some respite from their living conditions.

Yesterday, we went to Causey Farm in Co Meath, between Navan and Kells, one of these farms that allows visitors to interact with animals and find out how farms operate.

With me were about 30 families; a real mix of people. Kids of all ages, young parents, some older parents, one mother. There was a grandmother who has found herself homeless.

They all had their own stories to tell and their own experiences of homelessness. There is no one common route into homelessness. Of course there were people there, you might be described as ‘the new homeless’.

Katey has two kids with her partner, aged seven and three and like a lot of people, she was a victim of the upturn in the rental market:

On top of that, there are two issues with emergency accommodation.

There isn’t enough of it and we saw that this week.

But also, it’s not child friendly. Now you might say it’s emergency, it’s not long term, it doesn’t need to be child friendly, it’s just needs to be a roof and four walls for the night but the problem is that people end up in emergency accommodation for a long time.

Siobhan has been homeless since 2013.

She, her partner and their three kids were living with her mother but she got very unwell and they were forced to leave but they had nowhere to go so they have been in emergency accommodation.

She’s on the social housing waiting list but could be on it for years. They’ve have been in several different places. Sometimes the five of them sharing a single hotel room, other times the family are split up between different hotels.

According to Siobhan, the place she is located at the moment is crawling with bed bugs. They wake up bitten on their arms and legs every morning. They eat from the chipper every night because there is no cooking facilities. She is finding it difficult to shield her kids from the realities of their situation. She tries to convince them that they’re a normal family, they’re just like everyone else, they’re just like their friends at school but then this is how they are treated in their emergency accommodation:

 

And so we went on an excursion.

The kids adored it all but Roisin, a child care worker with Focus, wanted to stress these are normal people with normal lives.

With the numbers climbing so high, we’re in danger of forgetting that we’re talking about real people with real lives and not just a statistic. If the numbers went down to 600 overnight, there would be great back slapping done and people would think it’s great but she made the point, that would still mean 600 children without a home.

It’s important that people don’t lose sight of that fact…

Newstalk have partnered up with Focus Ireland for their Shine A Light Campaign 2015.

It’s on 16th October and they are asking people to raise funds and spend a light sleeping out to raise awareness of homelessness. In Dublin, it’s happening at Christchurch Cathedral and Shine a Light Munster will take place in the historic Cork City Goal.