Mr. Mike Allen:

I was slightly worried by Deputy Casey's question. I do not want it to be recorded that Focus Ireland said there would be 48,000 new house completions in 2023. I was quoting what the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government had told the fiscal advisory committee. Looking at what others have said in terms of the total amount of need, there is a general consensus, including ESRI and IBEC, that if we are not producing 36,000 new housing completions every year we are not meeting the new demand that is coming on. In the Government's predictions which were in the fiscal advisory committee, it states that by 2022 we would meet that target. However, the Deputy is absolutely right. We must not think of this as a case of when we meet that target the figure is gone because each year for the past decade that we failed to meet, all those households - not just families 0 who were seeking a home and could not find one have been waiting to come on to the market. Obviously, those households who are better resourced, and more wealthy, will get the first additional ones that come, all else being equal, unless we intervene in the market. If we leave this up to the market, we know who will be at the back of the queue.

Clarifying the Deputy's point, our figure, that Ms Lambe talked about yesterday and today, that only 9% of the children who are on the Focus Ireland caseload have a child support worker is worrying. One hundred per cent of the other families do not have a child support worker. The 9% is the best in the class. There are no child support workers, as far as I am aware, in the model that was rolled out in homeless hubs. Clearly, the families that do not have an adult key worker do not have a child support worker. For the vast majority of children, there is nothing. That really needs to be borne in mind. I absolutely agree with the Ombudsman for Children, Dr. Muldoon, that we can solve that more quickly in the hubs but we must not forget it would appear that the most vulnerable families are not in the hubs.

On the own-door accommodation, I will give two examples of facilities that Focus Ireland runs - a place in south Dublin that some Deputies would know well and one in Limerick in which Focus Ireland was supporting families. In one case, in south Dublin, it is a block of apartments and there are other blocks of apartments beside it which are people's homes. Physically, it is exactly the same as a nearby block of apartments, each of which is somebody's home. South Dublin County Council is using it as emergency accommodation. It is a flat or an apartment with a key in the front door, one goes in and that is the person's unit. It has a kitchen and a bathroom and it is one's own space. Similarly, the one in Limerick was actually apartments at the back of a hotel for some medium-term accommodation and Limerick County Council took it over, and we are supporting families there. The family has a key to their own door. When we started providing support in those, the families were homeless. When they change the designation they are no longer accounted as homeless but they are still paid out of the homeless budget; they still have support workers because they are homeless; and, the expectations that they need to move out of homelessness are still there. It is quite clearly a different form of accommodation and it is a better form of accommodation. We would say that we should be looking at own-door accommodation as the way of providing emergency accommodation.

Also, it is clearly homeless accommodation. If one looks at the atmosphere or the living circumstances, for example, in the block in south Dublin, between the accommodation in which everybody is a tenant, it is their home and the person knows he or she is there either permanently if the person owns it or on a security as compared to the place where it is homeless accommodation where the occupants know that they are not there for long and they must keep on looking; they are completely and utterly different places to live. No matter how much support we put in to make it a better place to live, it is still homeless emergency accommodation. I would repeat the point that if the Minister had sat down with us and said that we should be counting families in this own-door accommodation as a separate category to the others because it is different and we recognise where we are doing things better than others, we would have saved a year of rowing. We would have agreed to that. However, we did not sit down. It was not explained. It was just a change. Far more collaboration on these issues is needed rather than the current position.

On the last set of questions Deputy Casey asked which were about why the figures differ, I am not sure exactly to which figures the Deputy was referring. Ehat is at play there is flow and stock. One needs to think of homelessness - I am sorry if people will say that I have been talking about this for a long time but I always find this a useful image - as a river and not as a pond, or as people moving through a room and out of a room. The figures that we were reporting here are the number of families in Dublin who became homeless and entered formal homelessness. If a higher number of people leave, then the total number falls and it is possible in a particular month that the number of families becoming newly homeless rises while the total number of families who are currently homeless falls because we - Ms Lambe and her team and others - have been successful in moving people out.

That leads me to the Deputy's final question about what we can do better. I would say if we do not provide more homes, there is no solution. There is no solution to this problem without more homes. Some of the homes, as Deputy O'Dowd stated, can come from homes that are currently empty and unused. It is shocking that we have had this enormous figure out there for so many years that were to be a solution and it is ones and twos that have come through. We would say that the Irish property owner reacts a bit more to sticks rather than carrots and some form of taxation or pressure to make property owners explain why a place is empty rather than our having to go chasing them would be necessary there.

The question becomes how, while we are waiting for the housing should we put it that way, do we better manage the situation. If one goes back to the metaphor of the people moving through the room and the people moving out of the room, not everybody stays in the room for the same length of time. One could have exactly the same inflow and exactly the same outflow, and have a completely different mix of people in the room. What is happening at present is the most vulnerable families are being left in the room for the longest period of time. Families which are large, families which are Travellers, some families from ethnic minorities - some of them move out very quickly but some of them get trapped - and people with all sorts of vulnerabilities are the ones who get left behind. That is where one gets more than 160 families who have been left for two years. At the heart of that is not only the number of social houses we have; it is allocations. If we do not allocate the social housing to families who will not get into the private rented sector, they will remain homeless. They will suffer and their children's lives will be made an absolute misery unless we get over the view that we cannot allocate social housing to homeless families because in some way this will encourage people to become homeless. Is there anybody who could read all these reports and listen to all the examples who could genuinely believe that families are deliberately putting their children in the circumstances that are being described yet our public policy is driven by that belief?

What drives public policy on homelessness is a public and political attitude that people are making themselves homeless and we will make them less likely to be homeless if we make life more difficult for them. All the organisations here, including Focus Ireland, believe families are much more likely to move out of homelessness if they are coping with homelessness and are supported. Take the pressure off them. Allow them the right or the possibility to have options and stop treating them as if they are somehow responsible for their circumstances.