Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Senator Fitzpatrick has given me quite a list . I agree with her that five years of work has gone into the commission's report and a lot of it was put into creating the database. This is why the legislation was put forward, solely to have a database that will be of use to survivors. It is the only reason the legislation was ever put through. I am glad the legislation was passed because the database is there and will be valuable for future information and tracing legislation. We are committed to widespread publication and dissemination of the report once it is published. I am very happy we will engage with the committee on it. The Senator is right with regard to stakeholders. We have a stakeholder group with which the Department communicates. It includes representatives of survivor groups and individual survivors and they will be the people who are engaged with first.

On the issue of youth funding, the €5 million extra announced for next year is current funding and it will help to bridge the funding difficulties which I know many youth services throughout the country face. We were asked for €4.7 million by the youth sector and we gave €5 million. I was struck by the very strong contributions of a number of committee members when we met about a month ago.

On childcare there are three big pieces of work, which are the funding model, the operating model and the workforce plan. I hope they all will have either final or close to final reports by the middle of next year and I hope that in budget 2021 we can start to take steps to continue to support our childcare services with greater investment and more targeted investment.

I take on board the Senator's point on direct provision. Human rights will be absolutely central to the provision of a new model of accommodation. I agree that the solution to accommodating people in international protection will be found in the wider commitment of the Government to address the housing crisis. There is a commitment to 30,000 social housing units throughout the lifetime of the Government, for which significant funding was provided in this year's budget, and a commitment to new models of tenure, including a cost rental model. There is a wide range of commitments. The Government is committed to addressing homelessness crisis and ending direct provision. They are not in any way contradictory.