Mr. John McCarthy:

I thank the Deputy. On the first issue, I cannot attest to the figure of 500,000 people the Deputy referred to. There is a difference between the UK and Ireland. In Ireland if families or individuals present as homeless, even though they may not strictly have entitlement to housing services within the law, they are provided with emergency housing supports on a repeated short-term basis. In the UK, as I understand it, those services are not provided to anything like the same extent. In a post-Brexit situation, the movements of people both legally and otherwise is an issue that is being looked at. The Dublin Region Homeless Executive has formed a group to look at the possible implications for homeless services and we are liaising with it. We are about to engage in a liaison with the Department of Justice and Equality because there are connected issues across the system that we will need to join up.

On the issue of standards, the National Standards Authority of Ireland, NSAI, is the key accreditation body for products generally in the construction industry and otherwise. The key thing from a building point of view is that products will continue to have the relevant CE mark, meaning they meet the relevant standards. The Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation and the NSAI have been looking at this. There have been some inquiries from some certifying bodies - I forget the technical term - looking to relocate to Ireland so they can continue to provide those kinds of CE marking services.

In terms of Traveller accommodation, we have certainly had difficulties in recent years in terms of the drawdown of funding from the Traveller accommodation budget. Looking back as far as the year 2000, not far off 20 years ago, we have invested a total of just over €350 million in Traveller accommodation. Looking at more recent years, particularly in 2017, for example, the allocation for capital was €9 million, yet €4.8 million was drawn down. There are problems in particular areas. The Minister of State, Deputy English, has established an expert group to dig into this to see what issues are giving rise to the poor drawdown of the available funding. I do not want to start talking about specific cases that have been in the media. Local authorities will be able to provide plenty of examples of where there can be difficulties getting projects through the planning process. There can sometimes be local opposition. As we have seen in some cases when projects are delivered, they can run into issues at that stage. A group has been established by the Minister of State, Deputy English, to drill into it to see what the issues are that need to be tackled to get the Traveller accommodation programme back delivering at a rate equivalent to the funding that is available for it.