They arrived on Tuesday from Ile-de-France. Nineteen homeless people spent their first night in Montgermont (Ille-et-Vilaine), near Rennes, and started their care in a “temporary airlock” which must find them a place of reception in Brittany. A project that had sparked controversy, in the run-up to the Paris Olympics.
These 19 people, including a family whose wife is pregnant, took place Tuesday morning in a bus at Porte de la Chapelle, in the north of Paris. They arrived at the beginning of the afternoon in front of a hotel in the industrial zone of Montgermont where they were welcomed by members of the Aurore association, commissioned by the public authorities.
An “appropriate orientation”
“We insisted (…) that the principle of volunteerism be respected. For it to be so, a special bond with families and individuals is needed. We have day care centers where social workers know these people” and have informed them about this system, said Fabien Beliarde, director of activities for the Aurore association which manages this project. It is a question of “making an assessment of their situation and their needs” to find “an orientation which will be adapted”, specified during a press point the mayor of Montgermont, Laurent Prizé.
“We are the eighth region to open this type of system, which aims to welcome, for periods of three weeks, a group representing around fifty people in a situation of wandering in the Ile-de-France region”, added said for his part Paul-Marie Claudon, secretary general of the prefecture of Ille-et-Vilaine.
Migrants were evacuated
The social hotel welcoming these homeless people in Montgermont until recently housed families of migrants from the Rennes metropolis. The latter had been dislodged, with the dispatch of police forces, to allow the opening of the “temporary reception area” and many found themselves on the street again, according to volunteers who had taken care of them. Associations had denounced “the haste and inhumanity” of these “rehousings”.
“Everyone regrets the way it happened. It’s not our values, we weren’t aware, we weren’t present, ”defended Fabien Beliarde. As the Olympics approach, the government wants to encourage thousands of homeless people, mainly migrants, to leave the Paris region on a voluntary basis for various regions, arguing the drop in the number of hotels ready to accommodate them .