Ms Mary Hayes:

I will take separately the different trends among those presenting at homelessness services. Family homelessness and single homelessness tend to be different issues and we have seen two different trend lines. Single homelessness has climbed relentlessly in one direction, whereas family homelessness in December 2021 had fallen by about 40% since the peak in 2018. There was definitely a fall-off in the number of families presenting from private rented accommodation or due to a notice of termination situation during the moratoriums.

We did not see the same trend in single homelessness, which leads me to believe it is really an issue relating to access to affordable accommodation. Cases often involve presentations from the family home or institutions or they may be migrant workers. They may have some work but they may not be able to afford housing, or they may be in housing in a sharing arrangement or overcrowding, for example, and fall out of it. That is a trend in regard to single accommodation.

As for families, there used to be a fairly even split between the number of issues relating to family or relationship breakdown, a small but significant volume of domestic violence, and notices of termination. Increasingly in recent years, there have been more presentations of families accessing low-paid work or looking for work who exercise their rights as EU mobile citizens to work in Ireland, so we have seen an increase in that context in the Dublin region.