Mr. Tony Cunningham:

I might just give Ms Carthy a bit of warning that she might want to come in around procurement and what the IWA advocates for in terms of taxis and financial contracts and so on. There is a piece here in the regarding the urgency involved. The Senator referred to pilots. The urgency is now. As each of us sits here on our screens, there are people in nursing homes who do not have silence and space or who cannot get their own waffles and so on. There are people who are living on couches and who do not have control over their lives because they are living with elderly parents, and there are others who do not have their own homes. The urgency is now.

On procurement, we are an approved housing body and we specialise in wheelchair accessible housing. We try to have the housing in integrated environments and in communities, as opposed to being set aside. Recently, we bought a number of apartments out in the community - we find them on daft.ie- and we go as accessible as we can. We get a 100% funding from the capital assistance scheme, CAS, for the acquisition. Then, because the housing is not designed for each user, we also put in a separate application for adapting the units. One apartment comes to mind. The price to buy was €175,000. I believe that the adaptations came in at approximately €40,000. These were the minimum adaptations required in order that somebody could move into the apartment. The tenant who is in the apartment now must also apply for a further housing adaptation grant. The first adaptation grant was part of the CAS funding. Now the person involved has to apply to the local authority for the adaptation grant because there is a narrow corridor from the living area to the bedroom and because the door into the bathroom is on the right-hand side of this, the tenant cannot take the corner because his wheelchair is wider than other chairs. As well as issue with the doors and the frames, his fingers that are getting caught in this door. So, there was the acquisition price, the adaptation price, the professional fees for the architects and others, there is the cost for the tendering process because it must go through e-tenders, and then there is a follow-up where we must go for a further housing adaptation grant to make it liveable, and it is still not up to the standard one would require. There is a huge waste of money in this process, and yet we are talking about value for money and extra space. There is a contradiction. The urgency is now, and decisions can and should be made around this.