Ms Tanya Ward:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present to it today on this very important issue. The Children's Rights Alliance is an umbrella organisation. We represent more than 100 members. Our goal is to make Ireland one of the best places in the world to be a child. Our work is around promoting children's rights in Irish policy, law and services. We also provide an information helpline and legal advice services for children, young people and families so that they can contact us directly.

The issues I want to raise today relate to our helpline but also those coming from our members. We started working on this issue a number of years ago. Our members contacted us because they we so concerned about what they were seeing regarding the homelessness crisis.

Teachers were telling us they had seen children arrive in dirty clothes for the first time in their lives and that they had never seen it before. They are seeing children arriving hungry and exhausted. They wanted to know what we could do about it. The ombudsman has talked about the high numbers we have at the moment. There is no doubt that there has been a lot of Government action in this area to try to alleviate the impact of homelessness. A good example of that would be the early years scheme that was put in place to give children in homeless accommodation the chance to be in an early years setting, to get a free meal and to get someone to look after them. There was research commissioned into food poverty.

The other area is that of education issues. The Children's Rights Alliance decided to take that up directly because we felt there was a particular gap and wanted to bring some attention to it. With the support of the Community Foundation of Ireland we commissioned Dr. Geraldine Scanlon, who is in the Gallery today, and Ms Grainne McKenna to carry out a study. They found that school was a really important source of solace for these children and that the parents would do anything they could to keep the children in school because it was their only sense of normality. The schools were found to be doing a great job. That was the overwhelming feeling coming through all the case studies with the families. The flip side of that was the individual experience of children. Parents were spending long periods travelling across the city to keep their child in school. For example, there is no homeless facility in Bray at the moment so people from Bray will end up being accommodated in Dublin, maybe in Clontarf. Parents could be travelling across the city nearly two hours to get the child to school. The child will be hungry and will probably miss the breakfast club and arrive at school late. He or she will not have homework done having spent another two hours trying to get home in the evening, will try to keep up in school but start to find it very difficult. It is very hard to motivate oneself when one is hungry and tired. When a child starts falling behind in school it is very hard for that child to motivate himself or herself. That was ultimately what the researchers were finding with these children. The longer they were spending in homeless accommodation, the greater the impact on their well-being and their mental health. We are very concerned about the impact on their long-term prospects in school and their ability to complete school and do well there. These are the kinds of things we are grappling with.

When we look at the homeless crisis itself, there are lots of solutions and tangible ways we can address this crisis. These include public housing to address the housing shortage, preventative measures to keep people in their homes, and also measures to alleviate the impact of homelessness on children. Particularly in non-DEIS schools, teachers and principals told the researchers of our report that they needed support, they needed an extra teacher or a home-school liaison officer for a temporary period to get them through this crisis. That made all the difference for them. They also talked about the need for a small budget to buy a meal for a child or to buy a bean bag if a child needed to sleep - these are some of the things they were thinking about - or a school uniform if the child arrived in dirty clothes. These are very basic things but they could make all the difference for these children. I urge the committee to look at prevention, housing solutions and measures to alleviate the impacts of homelessness. I am sharing time with my colleague, Mr. Mooney, who will talk about the legal solutions to this homelessness crisis.