Mr. Pat Doyle:

All of those voids were local authority voids. I would like to correct any misapprehension in regard to our work and say that we support the work of local authorities and work well in partnership with them. I have not met any senior local authority official who was not dedicated to solving the housing crisis. However, the committee is right that resources and backing are significant issues for the local authorities.

The 39 voids we identified were all in Dublin, unfortunately. We identified some in Limerick where we also operate, but we have not got them over the line yet. One complex we identified for example is Hogan Court in Dublin. Our staff are constantly pulling in and taking photographs of buildings while scouting around every day and we then approach our local authority colleagues. The first building we worked on was in Pim Street. It had been a six-unit local authority building for 30 years, five two-bedroom units and one one-bedroom unit. The local authority had handed over the building to an approved housing body in the early 2000s, but that housing body let the building go because of a management issue and handed it back to the council, leaving one couple remaining in the building. All of the other units were boarded up, leaving that couple very vulnerable.

We asked the local authority to give the property to us and we then went out and looked for a donor. We got a donor through a foundation, a building construction company set up as a foundation which built housing mainly in Africa and Asia. It had never done that work in Ireland. We were the first group anywhere in the British Isles to have the funding directed this way rather than to Africa or Asia. The company was doing the type of work being done in Haiti. We applied to the company and it gave us €100,000 and we matched that with €24,000 of our own funding and renovated the six units in approximately 22 weeks. We made an excellent video of the work and it is on our YouTube clip. We put one Housing First client into one of the six units, somebody straight from the streets. We took two young people from care who had been condemned into homeless services after they left care and took people for the remainder of the units from the housing lists. All of this was agreed with the local authority and all those we took were registered with the local authority.

We see this work as a real partnership with the housing authority. It owned the building. We did not need to own it. The local authority leased it to us, but has not transferred it to us. I am on the housing strategic policy committee, SPC, and I know a number of colleagues on the councils do not want to see housing stock transferred to voluntary housing associations. I am of the view we do not need to own the property. We had a lease that was long enough to allow the funder invest with us and we have given full-time tenancies to six people. We have repeated that good practice process since, particularly in regard to how quickly we have turned property around, which has increased the local authority's confidence in us to provide units.

The challenge for approved housing bodies is to prove they can provide homes and do it well, quickly and cost efficiently. Following Pim Street, we identified a building in Hogan Court with 11 units and we turned them around in 12 weeks. We secured all the funding for that initiative from the Construction Industry Federation. That accounted for their social corporate responsibility for 2015 and we had the units open for Christmas.

Another partnership followed a call from Government last year for public bodies to make good any properties they had that were not in use. We identified eight units the OPW owned. These had been a compulsory purchase for an extension of the National Art Gallery but capital funding collapsed following the crisis and the OPW had been sitting on the units for a number of years. We have taken over those units on a ten-year lease. We have refurbished them in conjunction with Dublin City Council and the Housing Agency and now have eight homeless people in them. One of those is a lad straight from the streets, the lad I mentioned who said he still cannot believe he is in housing. A number of the tenants have come from care and the rest have come from the homeless priority housing list. We will maintain and support the units and the individuals in them to ensure they keep their tenancies.

Going back to what Deputy Ruth Coppinger was saying, we do not support the eviction of anybody from any unit. The trust has a policy whereby we do not evict. All homeless service providers have now bought into that policy in Dublin. What we look for is resettlement rather than eviction. Sometimes people will cause considerable damage and annoyance and perhaps make threats to other tenants such that it is not feasible for them to stay in that location. Everybody else around them might have to move out. What we say all the time is that there should be a resettlement programme rather than an eviction. We have had some very difficult cases, but the trust has never evicted anybody. As Fr. McVerry said, we are dealing with a very small number of people who have very complex needs. The vast majority of housing providers, including voluntary housing associations, deal with the general public. There should not be evictions. We do not support them.

There are different philosophies as to how we deal with the banks. As the Deputy said, we could write down the loan. Why not? The other option would be to sell AIB. I am not saying I would support taking that option; I am just stating the different arguments. We could sell AIB for €20 billion which we could ring-fence to house the most vulnerable and marginalised. I would be inclined to support the writing down of loans. Ulster Bank, for example, is going to write down loans taken over by a vulture fund. We should keep people in the houses in which they are living.