Mr. Cathal Morgan:

I will clarify that. The figures I gave were the end-of-year totals for placements in 2015. The local authorities placed 5,480 individuals. Obviously there are family cohorts within that, but that is the total number of individuals who occupied an emergency bed throughout the year.

I will take it one step further. Committee members should keep in mind that many households come into homeless services and, for different reasons, move on either into tenancies, back home or into treatment. It is dynamic and there is considerable churn within homeless services. Let us consider the figures for one night, 31 December 2015. We had 2,279 adults in homeless services. Within that figure there are adults and their child dependants. At the moment we have 790 families in emergency accommodation. In total, the adults have 1,616 child dependants. The kind of accommodation we provide in order to avoid the need to sleep rough includes commercial hotel settings - we do not want to be doing this but we do not want families to be on the streets either. I am sorry about all the statistics - they are available on homelessdublin.iefor anyone who wants to see them. Anyway, of the 790 families, 581 are in commercial hotel settings. By the way, they are getting support from homeless action teams with a view to helping them to move on. The remaining 209 families are in what we call supported lodgings. In other words, they are in supported temporary accommodation where we have staff on-site. That is how the figures break down.