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

Let me respond to that. This is very important and in some senses I am even more concerned now than I was at the start. Again I will be as measured as I can be. Third-party accounts of very complex family situations are not evidence. I am not disputing that the person who sent Mr. Skehan that may believe that. However, that is not evidence of people gaming the system. That is somebody's interpretation of a set of circumstances.

Mr. Skehan's first quote, for example, was from a young woman on social media. None of us knows from that account if this person was made homeless from a notice to quit from a landlord, if there was abuse in the family relationship or other family circumstances. I appeared on a radio show recently talking about this and a very similar social media post was used by an interviewer.

The implication is that this person is not genuinely in there when it is clearly not demonstrated from the information that Mr. Skehan has given.

I will go back to what I say. I hear all the time all sorts of things. I hear that a mother with one child can easily get a three bedroom house in the local authority area in which I live. That is not true. I go and check it out whenever I am told this and I look at the complexity of the situation. When somebody presents as homeless and Mr. Skehan should know this, given his position, there is a very rigorous test, there is documentation required. They engage with professional local authority staff at the front line who make very difficult decisions every day to allocate very limited volumes of emergency accommodation. If it is suggested that even one family slips through that process, we are suggesting that a wrong call was made by one of those staff. Likewise, if somebody is in emergency accommodation and they do not stay in that emergency accommodation of a single night, that emergency accommodation is taken away from them straight away by the local authority, the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive. I have no difficulty with somebody who might be in bed and breakfast accommodation in a hotel going back and staying with family and friends for some relief. In many of these emergency accommodation locations, one cannot spend the day there. There is nothing in what Mr. Skehan has said that provides any evidence of gaming the system. A councillor and another individual informed Mr. Skehan that they think there is a problem. All I am saying is that this is the report of his organisation. The Housing Agency looked at the matter and while it is said there may be a problem it provided no evidence for it. If Mr. Skehan is concerned that the Housing Agency's report is not good enough, in the first instance it should be his responsibility to get the Housing Agency to do proper research and produce a new report.

When Mr. Skehan comes out as the Chairman of the Housing Agency - and I understand the role of the board - he is perceived to be a spokesperson for that organisation because the ordinary punter on the street does not know the difference between a board member and a chief executive officer. When one uses the words "gaming the system", even though there is a caveat before the words, it sends out a signal that there is a big problem. Nothing of what Mr. Skehan has said suggests there is a problem. There may be, there are some people who think there are, or there is some speculation about problems. I think it was incredibly ill advised. I say that with the greatest of respect to Mr. Skehan. In the period that Mr. Skehan remains as chairman of the Housing Agency, I ask him, given the vulnerability of families who are in emergency accommodation and the staff dealing with them on the front line, to please be thoughtful in how he uses these words. For a social scientist in a university lecture, most of what he said is fine, but back out in the world of families dealing with homelessness and workers dealing with the stress of trying to respond adequately, those same rational, logical social scientist conversations, can be deeply hurtful and can feed into a narrative that many of these people are in there to short circuit the long housing waiting list and are turning down properties.

I do not have a difficulty with a person turning down an offer of accommodation, if the reasons are legitimate. Nothing in what Mr. Skehan has said has given me any facts from the original source that those refusals might not have been legitimate. I have dealt with two homeless families, one family with a child with special needs in particular on whose behalf I fought with them tooth and nail because the offers of accommodation they were given were so wholly inappropriate for them, that I think the council made a mistake. The council eventually agreed and they were put in long-term accommodation, appropriate for their needs. Again, we need to be careful that we do not feed, unintentionally, a whole set of prejudicial narratives about what is going on. If those few emails and posts are the basis of Mr. Skehan making the claim, that is very disappointing, given the fact that he is a very smart man who understands the need for evidence and the organisation which he chairs, the Housing Agency, which has done a report has not provided any.