Ms Leilani Farha:

One should watch the mayor of Paris over the next number of years because she is doing all sorts of interesting things. We tend to see it at city level. The city of Vancouver took a more modest approach of a 1% vacant home tax. It is certainly an issue that cities are grappling with and trying to address. I am really interested in the issue of the power or lack of power of cities and local councils. I wrote my first report on the human rights obligations with respect to housing in cities. Anyone exercising Government authority has international human rights obligations. I do not know if it is ripe for discussion in Ireland but I think it is a pretty interesting discussion to have. What role could cities have if they had more power, resources and skills?

There were two questions about definitions. I hope that a lack of a firm definition of homelessness would not keep any Government from acting on homelessness. Certain people are homeless absolutely. It is a gross violation of human rights. There is an obligation and duty to act immediately. I have come up with a definition of homelessness that I think is human-rights compliant. It can be found in one of my reports. Here it is obvious the definition is too narrow. I find it shocking. It is narrow perhaps because the Government wants to be very exact in its measurement. The problem with that, as Ms Kerin rightly pointed out, is the numbers that are created and what is counted dictates policy. We end up with this very narrow policy that is not human rights compliant. Obviously people living on the streets are homeless. They are not counted in Ireland's homeless numbers which seems odd.