Ms Edel Quinn:

I wish the committee a good morning and thank the members for the opportunity to present to the committee here today. I will say a quick word about the alliance. We unite over 100 member organisations working to make Ireland one of the best places in the world to be a child.

Children under the age of 18 experienced the steepest rise in homelessness of any age group over the past five years, with children under four making up the largest cohort living in emergency accommodation. As a society, I think we can agree that this is unacceptable.

Young parents aged 18 to 24 years make up almost one-in-four of families in Dublin experiencing homelessness. We often think of this as a Dublin problem but outside of Dublin, the problem of child and family homelessness has also increased. We had almost 500 families with over 1,000 children in emergency accommodation only two months ago - those figures are from April 2019.

The Report Card is a Children's Rights Alliance annual flagship publication. It is our tool for identifying serious issues for children. It examines the Government's commitments to children in its programme for government. This year, in our report card, the Government received an F, or a fail, for child and family homelessness. This is due to the ongoing phenomenon of child and family homelessness and the failure of Government to embrace strategies that will reduce the number of children living in emergency accommodation.

I briefly want to paint a picture of what living in emergency accommodation is like for children today. First of all, what is a home? A home should be a warm, secure and safe place for children. We released a report last year entitled Home Works on the educational needs of children experiencing homelessness. What that study showed us was that these children wake up in the morning, often really early, for instance, at 5.30 a.m., so that they can make a long journey to school because they are often in emergency accommodation that is further away from their schools. They wake up in one room, which they share with family, with their parents and siblings. Since there is a lack of storage and cooking facilities in the room, often the parents struggle to find breakfast for their children. What we have found in our reports and what we hear through our members and through our Access to Justice information line is that the parents are going to an Esso station to try to find a roll or something to give these children for breakfast, and often they make a choice between paying expensive transport charges for the bus journey to school and breakfast.

The education of these children is severely disrupted. They have inadequate rest because of the conditions that they are sleeping in. Homeless accommodation can be noisy, with discos or merely other residents in emergency accommodation making noise. They are falling asleep at school. They are falling behind in their education.

When they come back to the emergency accommodation in the evening, they have no place to do their homework. They have no place for normal things that children do, such as play dates, and to rest and relax. We are finding that their friendships are strained. Older children do not want to tell their friends - they are embarrassed to tell their friends where they are staying - and they experience anxiety, low self-esteem and feelings of isolation where these friendships breakdown.

The cycle continues. We believe that the system needs to be redesigned in order to change this. I will hand over to my colleague, Saoirse Brady, who will set out some of those solutions.