Mr. Bill Griffin:

Arms of the State are meant to deal with these matters. My personal view is that we are in a crisis. We talk about it being an emergency, a crisis. Normally we do different things in those situations but the arms of the State are progressing on as they have always done. A person who is dependent on rent supplement or housing assistant payments, which are 30% below the asking rent in Galway even with an increase, is not competing on an equal basis with, for example, my son, if he was renting and had the asking rent. Added to that is the delay in processing how much money the person can bring to the table, which means he or she is definitely at the back of the queue. A recent survey in Galway carried out via Daft.iefound that 96% of the rentable properties in Galway were not accessible by people in receipt of social welfare benefits. No social housing has been built in Galway since 2009, in seven years, and, consequently, there is almost total reliance on the private sector to provide social housing.

Regarding the model suggested to house single people, we got together, at our instigation, with other housing agencies, COPE Galway and Cluid Housing, and we applied for funding under the last round of capital assistance scheme, CAS, funding. We were given €2.1 million to buy 16 apartments in Galway, ring fenced for people in emergency and transitional accommodation. We are still resisting calls from the county council, which is under great pressure, asking, for example, if could we put, say, Mary, into one of those units as she is really in need. We say "No" to such requests as this project was to "unsilt" things, as it were. If, for example, we cannot move people on in a resettlement service provided by the Simon Community Galway, people in emergency services cannot move in there and the same applies to people on the streets. A way around that is to have special projects for which funding is ring-fenced. That is a solution for 16 people but the knock-on effect of it will affect 16 more people. We must remember that mechanisms have always been put in place in terms of what we are doing, but the Government and Departments need to reassure us that they are working efficiently. There cannot be delays without good reason. The fact that it takes ten weeks to process a person's application for rent supplement means that person will lose out.