Ms Tanya Ward:

I agree with Deputy Rabbitte this crisis is a result of the recession, the IMF visit and decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s to stop building social housing. This is what it is about. The homeless crisis is symptomatic of a deeper problem and it is a crisis of the rental market. The rental housing market is carrying everyone. It is why rental costs are spiralling out of control. If I were here speaking about child poverty I would say people on good incomes experience poverty because their incomes are being eaten because of the cost of rent. I agree the solution is building. On Saturday, I heard the Taoiseach speaking about building more houses this year than ever before, with 22,000. This is great to hear, and more investment is being made, but the challenge is with regard to what is needed. IBEC states 36,000 completions a year are needed to keep up with the growth of the population, workers coming from outside Dublin and regional centres where the crisis is hitting, and workers coming from other countries.

Private builders have a solution and they have an important role to play. Some of what they are building is not having the impact we thought it would. The reason high-density student accommodation is being built is because of the price of land. It is the only way some of them can make a profit but actually we need far more homes. The only solution is for the State to get building directly itself and increase the number of homes being made available to people.

Finland does not have a homeless crisis but had one in the past. It addressed it through the Government having its own construction company, which built sustainable housing. Denmark is another example. Here, in the past, when social housing was provided local authorities provided 30% of housing. I grew up in Cabra. My father's family were working people. They were not on the social housing list. They both had jobs when they got the house. Local authorities were providing housing for working people. Something we will have to do to address the crisis is have social housing not only for vulnerable families but also for working people on low incomes. This is the solution. If we really want to end the crisis this is what we need to do. We need to get building.

Professor Tony Fahey in UCD has done a lot of work in this area. The research now states big housing developments are a good thing. We used to think they were a bad thing because of places such as Tallaght and Ballymun. Why those places had the problems they did but do not have them now was because at that time, there was poor family support and not enough gardaí doing their job investigating crime. They are now rich and vibrant communities. Ballymun still has its problems but this is what the finding is. Where we have developments with just a small number for social housing and the rest for private housing we find that people in social housing get very isolated in bigger-scale developments. We need to rethink the housing solutions. They are all there and I hope we can do it.

Deputy Rabbitte is right that there are quick fixes to some of the problems families face. Families want the Leap card for the summer. Is there some way to do this? With regard to education, non-DEIS schools state they need home school liaison officers or teachers. A family will arrive and the principal will contact Focus Ireland because there is no one else to do it. The principal spends time doing this work to try to get a family into a home or stays late with the family in school trying to find a solution. This would be a quick fix for those schools, as would giving them the small budgets they need. They are not looking for big money. The principals have said if they had a small amount of money to make sure every child was fed or he or she could subsidise something that was needed it would give the child and the family some level of dignity.

Some schools have come up with some very good solutions to help families. Some of them got beanbags for children to sleep on because they noticed they were exhausted. They were being quite flexible. They created a room for children to have a little nap to catch up. We could give all schools the capacity to do this or support them in what the solutions might be.

That could make a major difference to families. We are hearing feedback from some of our members, especially in the family support and early years areas. They want to provide more services but find it difficult to know where the children are. A mapping exercise needs to be done to ensure we know all the hubs where children are located and all the housing developments. For example, in a place like Clontarf all the local services have to be contacted and told the people are there so that they can start to provide the services or get the families into their services.