Ms Rebecca Keatinge:

I thank Deputy Casey for sharing his first-hand experiences of families who are accessing hotel accommodation. In terms of the impact on schools, I am sure Children's Rights Alliance will speak about that issue. I note that in Rebuilding Ireland provision is made for extra supports via home-school liaison officers. While we have come across home-school liaison officers in and outside DEIS schools, according to a presentation made by Focus Ireland yesterday, 91% of families accessing its services do not have the assistance of a child support worker, which is a matter of serious concern. We are concerned that the supports available are simply not accessible to the most vulnerable families and not made available at the earliest opportunity. I will give as an example a family who were self-accommodating and who really struggled to get a booking. They got a booking after living for six months in very precarious accommodation in a hotel near the airport, but they had to make a 90 km round trip to the children's primary school. During the course of the year the two children missed 80% of their classes. While the school was very supportive, how could it address that issue? It requires an holistic, inter-agency approach. I even had difficulty in linking the family with primary health care services in the area because they were living in precarious and unstable accommodation. Their booking was simply not for long enough. The matter is not straightforward; it is complex. The wraparound supports referred to in Rebuilding Ireland have not materialised for all families.

On one-night-only accommodation, the Deputy's use of terms such as "horrendous" and "completely unacceptable" is most welcome. We encounter such cases far too frequently and they are horrendous. There seems to be no logic to it. I dealt with a number of new mothers who had been discharged from maternity hospitals into one-night-only accommodation. Just before Christmas, one mother with a baby who was four weeks premature and a 16 month old baby was discharged into one-night-only accommodation.

That mother was spending time in shopping centres trying to prepare bottles but was unable to sterilise them and unable to breastfeed her child and to be somewhere safe and secure during the winter months. We engaged and were able with legal intervention to change that but that situation should not need a legal intervention. That simply should not arise. There is a gap in picking up on such vulnerability. There is also an element of overload for the housing authorities that engage with individual families' needs, and perhaps with the resources available, such provision is not feasible. The committee's focus of attention on that area will be most welcome.

In terms of prospective solutions, we support the constitutional right to housing and consider it to be as part of a host of measures. In response to Deputy Ó Broin's question, the recommendations we have made are set out in our substantive statement and they are being prioritised. Looking forward, we support the constitutional right to housing as an enduring and overarching protection to effect a range of statutory provisions that apply with respect to housing. It is related to not only the homeless area but the private rented sector, housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies and social housing. We believe that is a measure that would influence all those different areas.

To pick up on some of Deputy O'Dowd's points, I share the concern about the there being a lack of urgency on the ground. I am aware from frequent engagements with housing authorities of their exasperation about the bringing on stream of more suitable emergency accommodation. There is a will to do that. I have not identified the exact blockages but certainly there are some because now two years later we are in a situation where the majority of these families in the Dublin region are living in hotels. We very much focus only within the Dublin area. It has been good to hear the experiences of groups operating outside Dublin because we would have a number of contacts with people outside Dublin where there is a much more ad hocapproach to the provision of homeless accommodation and there would be broad reliance on bed and breakfast accommodation and hotels. We would have had a number of cases recently where families have had to be separated because they could not be all accommodated in one space. Obviously, that interferes with family life and compounds the chaos and distress of homelessness.

We welcome the Deputy's comments with respect to the right to housing and his support for the constitutional protection of that right. There is no quality of life when all members of a family are living in one room, be it in a stable booking or otherwise. I am working with a person currently who was in one night only accommodation and she is now living in one room with her four children, and they simply do not have a good quality of life.

The report published yesterday had some hard-hitting findings and some emotive examples of the impact of this on young children, in particular. We see that frequently in our casework. We welcome a call for extra focus and energy on this area. There is an imperative to deal with this issue. We hope recommendations can be made from this committee to influence policy in this area more broadly.