Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to suggest a couple of obvious names. The first is Dr. Eoin O'Sullivan from Trinity College, one of the country's leading academic experts on homelessness. He would be a good witness to invite as he has probably done the most up-to-date research on the causes of homelessness, funding models and so forth. Another is Mr. Cathal Morgan, the head of the homeless agency which co-ordinates the services in the four Dublin local authorities. There is also a need to invite some of the NGOs but one of the difficulties is that there is quite a large number of homeless service providers in the NGO sector. Rather than us cherry-picking and inviting one organisation and upsetting another, there are some existing forums of those organisations which could be invited. There is, for example, the homelessness forum in Dublin which represents all of the NGO service providers. There are similar forums in Cork and Limerick, which I understand cover both the county and the city areas. There used to be such a forum in the south east but I am not sure if it is still functioning. I am not suggesting that we invite all four but we did say that we wanted to get urban, rural and outside of Dublin perspectives. Perhaps a number of representatives from those forums could be invited. That would be preferable to inviting Focus Ireland or the Simon Community on its own and then upsetting Novas Initiatives, Sophia and so forth. There is also an argument for inviting one of the heads of homeless services from one of the councils that is under real strain, separate to the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, as well as somebody from the Department responsible for homelessness. I know that is quite a long list but-----