Ms Mary Hayes:

On single accommodation, the numbers are again quite sizable. I will start with some of the prevention work we have done in the executive. Not just in the DRHE but with the council we have decided older person homelessness is not something we want to see. We do not want to see older people coming into emergency accommodation and maybe having to share with a younger cohort where addiction is an issue. In those cases, we have built into our scheme of lettings a prevention approach where if we have older persons' accommodation or senior citizens' accommodation that we can go for an overall priority and immediately house those people. I accept that is not covering everybody and there is still a huge cohort of people whose needs we are not meeting.

On prevention, there are the prevention officers. The year before last, the Department gave us extra funding for housing support officers for single people. The officers' focus is on trying to acquire HAP and try to build up relationships, as well as to supplement the social housing offering we have.

Members will see fairly strong, consistent results in terms of our lettings to single adults experiencing homelessness. It is certainly a priority for us in Dublin because we are aware that we have never made a dent in that huge number or changed the curve in respect of single adults experiencing homelessness.

It is hard for me to say that we are able to separate all hostels. There are hostels and places available for people who do not have addiction issues. Sometimes people will say they do not have any addiction issues, go into accommodation and, subsequently, addiction issues become apparent and we have to move them out of the accommodation. I would say, however, that we have a good turnover in the accommodation we have, but perhaps we need more of it. As part of the homeless action plan in Dublin, we will look at whether we should segregate the accommodation we have a bit more and create some more drug-free spaces if we can. We have done that. The Peter McVerry Trust and Crosscare have developed some excellent services for us, just as the other services have developed really good low-threshold services, which are also important for people who are in the full throes of their addiction and need quite an amount of support.