Professor Eoin O'Sullivan:

I am not entirely sure of the reason for that. It certainly started in most of the regions in early 2019. It seems to be related to the fairly dramatic slowdown in the rate of new admissions or new entrants into emergency accommodation, rather than more exits from emergency accommodation. It is just the flow, particularly for families, so I think it is probably a mixture of both prevention and superior rates of exit.

Dublin will always be in that difficult position and, like any other capital city in Europe, it will have those additional problems. At this stage, we probably need a dual strategy, one for Dublin and one for outside of Dublin, because the difficulties in Dublin are profoundly different from those in Mullingar, Galway, Limerick or Cork.

In terms of deaths, it is very difficult to know. I have a difficulty with the term “homeless deaths” and I think Mr. Kenny has raised this point. As we said, 37,000 people entered emergency accommodation over the last six or seven years and the number of people who died out of those is absolutely tiny. While every death is appalling, to say that because I spent a period of time in emergency accommodation or in long-term accommodation funded under section 10, I am somehow to be labelled a homeless death is, to me, profoundly wrong.

We need to find a new language to describe this because they are not homeless. As per the Focus Ireland submission, the perception is that they are all deaths on the street when they are not. We need to be very careful with the language we use around this because it is profoundly misleading. The same is true with some of the headlines we see about homeless deaths. They are associated with tents and rough sleeping. We know the November count in Dublin was too high, but it was 137. No other capital city in Europe has such a low number of rough sleepers and we need to bear that in mind as well.