Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a good idea of what the answers to the questions are, and the people here today have already presented us with what are effectively the questions and the answers.

It is up to us to deal with it after that. The issue of support for the vulnerable was raised by numerous people and it is something that is growing. The problem is that growing numbers of people who previous had difficulty getting a local authority house now find themselves homeless and are on a different list altogether. It comes back to the need to reinvigorate direct build by local authorities and to call them local authority houses. Alongside that, local authority loans must be reintroduced in order to pick off the people who are now on the local authority housing list but who previously were able to provide themselves with a house. They are the young people.

The last point I want to make relates to the people who all three groups have referred to. We find in our work as public representatives that the people we deal with are young people, mostly with families. It is a sad reflection on our society that we have children whose introduction to life is that they do not know where they are going to live tomorrow, or that they know where they are going to live tomorrow and it is in emergency accommodation. That is a sad reflection on all of us. This goes back to before the boom, when it was obvious that these things were going to happen. The point I want to emphasise is that it is essential, just as in preparation for schools, the demography needs to be taken into account, that we identify the housing need, in terms of the number of families coming onstream, the number of children born in a particular year and the number of people likely to be in need of local authority housing or any other type of housing in the ten to 20 years afterwards. I am sorry for going on but that is my take on what I have dealt with in the past ten years.