Mr. Mike Allen:

I thank the Chair for those questions. On the first point, we know from Focus Ireland's own research that the most common reason for families becoming homeless is losing what has often been secure accommodation in the private rented sector. This often happens because the landlord is selling or moving family in, which are legitimate reasons under Irish law for evicting someone.

That is the most significant and largest group of people who are becoming homeless. Very often, what happens after the eviction and before they enter homeless services is that they go and live with somebody else among their wider family or friends. It is what the American homeless organisations call "doubling up". That eventually breaks down because it just is not possible for two families to live in a one-family home. Even in the best of family or friend relationships, what starts off as an act of kindness becomes something that could have negative long-term impacts on relationships because of the tensions, and then the family moves into homelessness.

One way of looking at what causes homelessness is that local authorities ask families becoming homeless why they are entering homeless services now. The families say they fell out with their sister or with friends and it goes down as a social conflict, but in fact the real reason they lost their home is for economic reasons, the landlords, and our failure to deliver enough homes and to protect tenants in the private rented sector. They try to prevent themselves going into homelessness by staying with wider family and friends, sometimes for long periods, and then we characterise their reason for going into homelessness as social causes and relationship breakdown. That leads us to completely misunderstand what is happening in terms of driving so many families into homelessness. We must find a better way of measuring that.

One of the most successful programmes of the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive is called Preventing Homelessness. In the technical language it would be known as "diversion". When a family comes in that is facing eviction, it may offer them homeless HAP, which is a genuine prevention of homelessness, or in some cases they convince the family to go back to their own parents or to wider family and stay there. You could argue that that is better than much of the emergency accommodation that might be offered, but it is never counted or measured and there has been no evaluation or understanding of the consequences of that for the family in homelessness or the long-term impact on the children. We are saying that what the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive is doing is a good measure, but the good measures need to be evaluated as well as the poor measures. We need to understand how they can be improved and what their consequences are. We hear it right across the country in a much less organised way that local authorities ask people if they are sure they cannot stay with their mother or cousins. That will be coming back. It has not been around for the past two years, but it will be coming back in a very strong way now that the numbers are going up. We need to understand it better in terms of numbers so that we can put it into our equations for ending homelessness and also knowing how to respond to it.

Domestic violence is very much part of Ms Byrne's story. She told us movingly about the consequences of that. Domestic violence is appalling in itself but the fact that it so often leads to homelessness for the victims of domestic violence is the bit that we can pay a bit more attention to. There is much more that can be done to deal with domestic violence and also a lot more to prevent it turning into homelessness. In recent years, we have been doing a major study with Dr. Paula Mayock in Trinity College Dublin, which will be published before the end of the year. It looks at exactly that question of what happens to households when there is domestic violence. It is not always but usually the mother who flees with the children and ends up in homeless services. Probably the most egregious example of siloisation and lack of integration of our public services when somebody is in crisis is the way we respond to those families fleeing domestic violence; it is up there among the worst that we could do. We will publish that before Christmas. I am not particularly looking for another gig, but if the committee were to invite Dr. Mayock, the researcher, to come in at some stage when the report is out, we would be delighted to go into more detail on what we have discovered in that research and the recommendations emerging from it. We are doing that in partnership with the Housing Agency and the Department of Justice. The partnership while working on the report has been positive, in conjunction with domestic violence charities. I hope the level of co-operation we have had in doing the research will follow through into implementing the recommendations.