Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This is a meeting we could do virtually which would give us a little more time and we would not be constrained to two hours. There have been 34 or 35 recorded deaths of people in emergency accommodation or sleeping rough. There is no official count, but those are the deaths that have been reported in the press. Dublin, Cork and Galway reported them. Last year there were 34 deaths in total, and the previous year there were approximately 32. By June of this year, we had already exceeded last year's total. There are some very good people in the area, including Professor Eoin O'Sullivan from Trinity College Dublin, who is one of the country's leading homeless experts, and those involved with the Dublin Region Homeless Executive. Maeve McClenaghan of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in Britain has conducted some very good research on this. I suggest that the committee should bring in experts to see if something is going on, something has changed or something is happening. Are there recommendations that the committee could make to the Government on how to address this? When someone dies on the street or in emergency accommodation in Britain, for example, an adult safety review can be requested. It looks back not to apportion blame but to see if there was a systems failure, or if an intervention could have been made that could be worked into the system to reduce future deaths. We conduct such reviews for young people who die in care but not for homeless deaths. There are other things. Some people say we are over-reliant on congregated dormitory-style accommodation. People with mental health or addiction issues are often nervous about going into those centres. There is a good commitment in the programme for Government to phase out congregated dormitory-style emergency accommodation. We should consider all these things in the context of the rising deaths.