Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank all our witnesses, and Ms Breathnach for sharing the experience of Waterford. It is great to hear that bed and breakfasts no longer need to be used. We know Waterford is leading the way in terms of delivering those one- and two-bed units, under its repair and lease scheme which has provided long-term solutions for people who were homeless. I very much welcome the Department’s commitment to ending homelessness by 2030. I support Senator John Cummins on his point that the Housing for All implementation plan needs to include targets on schemes such as repair and lease, and the tackling of vacancy and dereliction because this can play a role in long-term solutions for people who are homeless. My main comments are going to centre around Dublin and are for Ms Hayes more than anyone else. That is because I am a Dublin Deputy and the people who come to me looking for advice due to fear of homelessness or who have found themselves homeless, end up receiving support for her organisation.

I thank Ms Hayes and all her team for all they do to support people in homelessness and for progressing so many of the actions that we as a committee set out in our report on tackling homelessness. In particular, I welcome their updates on the inspection of facilities, the fact all families the DRHE deals with now have an assigned key worker and the fact single adults now have access to housing support workers. That is critical and it is an issue that has been raised with us time and again in committee. It arises also with the families we all deal with.

I welcome Ms Hayes’s assurance that no one is being denied access to emergency accommodation because of the local authority area or the county he or she comes from, an issue that was uncovered by "RTÉ Investigates". It is great that is no longer an issue on the ground. She stated 4,923 families had been prevented from entering homelessness through the creation of alternative tenancies in the Dublin region over the past three years. That is a real success. I for one am grateful these tenancies are there to support people who might otherwise find themselves homeless, a point that was raised earlier. They might not be in line with everyone's political ideology but they are a practical measure and intervention that prevents people from ending up homeless, which is the shared goal of all of us.

I would like to learn a little more about the reasons Ms Hayes identified, and the trends around them, for homelessness among people presenting in the Dublin region. She had previously identified relationship breakdowns and the ending of leases as the two main causes of homelessness, and earlier in this meeting she outlined the example of families arriving from abroad with nowhere to stay. Will she give a little more information on those trends? I do not know whether it is possible to quantify this in percentages, but to what extent are those three categories the driving forces for people ending up in homelessness? Is the ending of leases still as big an issue as it was before the pandemic?