Mr. Mike Allen:

I will take questions, some in reverse order. I will also ask Ms Lambe to comment on the specific things we would like to see, which was the first question.

On the question around the constitutional right to housing, Focus Ireland has made a contribution to that debate. The number of times I have heard Ministers say that things they would otherwise wish to do cannot be done because the Attorney General has said it would be against the Constitution proves to me that the Constitution, as interpreted, presents a genuine barrier to some of the solutions that Ministers while in office claim they would wish otherwise to take. This goes right back. There are very positive reasons for changing the Constitution but I would ask the committee to consider one. Repeated Ministers cite the Constitution and the current balance between the public good and the right to property. It is being interpreted in such a way that the individual right to property is trumping the desire of committees, the Dáil and Ministers to make changes in areas such as tenancy rights and the taking of property that is not being developed and so on. The Constitution is supposed to represent our will, but if the Constitution is presenting that sort of barrier against the people's will, then we should change it, if there are positive reasons for it.

Focus Ireland does not have a formal position on how we think independent inspections should be done. We do agree that it should be independent. As an organisation we are reluctant to see the creation of more long-term institutions that assume homelessness will always be with us. We believe that the inspection role should probably be attached to an existing institution that is able to do that. The Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, is the obvious one, but it would require some significant changes in what HIQA does because the facilities to be inspected are not clinical and so on. We want high standards set for independent accommodation, but not clinical standards. That would be one way to go.

On the question of the output, as Deputy Ó Broin has identified, it is quite clear that the number of people exiting homelessness is going down and the number of people becoming homelessness is going up. Quite clearly, the supply of social and affordable housing is totally inadequate. While it is arguable whether the targets are being met as intended in the plan, we believe that the targets are not high enough for the scale of the problem we have. A consistent underestimation of the scale of the issue by successive Governments has bedevilled the entire response to homelessness from the beginning of this crisis in 2014, and therefore the scale of the housing that is required. The single player who is refusing to come onto the pitch and who is essential to this is the local authority. This is not an ideological position. Families do not care if their house is built by the private sector, an approved housing body or a local authority. People care about the quality of it, the tenure they have and the rent they will pay. Historically, the player that delivered a quarter of the housing in which people in Ireland live was the local authority. If local authorities refuse or fail to play a role, which is happening in the delivery of social housing generally, we will suffer from that. The local authorities have to be there but they are not. That needs to be changed.

There is always the question of what our single demand would be. If there was to be one thing, I would say that we need a strategy. I know this does not answer it, but one particular response is not going to solve the issue. I will ask Ms Lambe to address specific elements, but unless there is some sort of plan to deal with it, to lay out what we understand the problem to be, the sorts of things we are going to do to resolve it, and the expected solutions, then any individual request one throws into that is just going to get lost in the mix.