Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. O'Carroll for attending today and for his report. One of the recommendations concerns getting data and analysing what has happened to people in respect of tracking and tracing why homeless people are dying. This is a major issue for me as well. As a Deputy for Cork North-Central, I have been raising this issue with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, for months. There are no figures in this regard for Cork. As far as I know, no figures are available nationally for the numbers of homeless people dying. Specifically regarding Cork, is there any way to get such figures? Is there something we can do to collate these figures? To give an example, in March this year two men died within two weeks of each other on the streets of Cork city. We cannot even begin to tackle the problem if we do not know the size of it, and that is the simple truth. The recommendations that have been presented here are probably relevant to Cork as well. I believe there should be a regional homeless executive to enable us to collate these figures and to work to try to reduce and prevent homeless deaths. What would Dr. O'Carroll’s opinion be in that regard?

Regarding the excellent point made on addiction, it has been found that 80% of people on the streets had substance misuse issues previously, but figures for those currently in active addiction are much lower. What I hear in this regard is that when people are doing everything right, and engaging with services, going into treatment and working on recovery, one of the big problems that then arises occurs when they come out and go back into homelessness. Those people are then faced with the choice of either going into a hostel, where they know people are using drugs and drug use is openly seen, or going onto the streets. From what we can see, therefore, homelessness itself is one of the biggest barriers to people getting into recovery. We must work on that aspect and drill into it. This goes to the point Dr. O'Carroll made about critical incident analysis. I refer to tracking if people who have passed away had an addiction, were on a journey or had attended residential treatment. I would love to discuss loads of things with Dr. O'Carroll regarding this report.

Groups such as Cork Penny Dinners work in the city. Many good voluntary groups help those in homelessness, but Cork Penny Dinners provides doctors, dentists and hairdressers and that organisation deals with homeless people as human beings. Caitríona Twomey and her volunteers do unbelievable work. The group also provides housing. Why are we relying on such voluntary groups to do this work? Surely this is work that the State should be doing. Moving to the points Dr. O'Carroll made about poverty and child trauma, I agree with him completely in this regard. If we can prevent such occurrences, it will have a profound impact in reducing homelessness and deaths. I thank Dr. O’Carroll very much and I hope he will have an opportunity to respond to some of these points.