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

I thank Senator Cummins. My questions are to Mr. Dennigan and to Ms Santoro. In Mr. Dennigan's opening statement, he spoke about his vision for milestones on the path to the 2030 goal of ending homelessness. I would love to learn more about what he feels those milestones should be. While Senator Fitzpatrick touched on this earlier, I know that Mr. Dennigan has some specific proposals on how we could proactively delay landlords who may want to leave the rental market. I would be interested in hearing about that. Focus Ireland’s trauma-informed approach to service provision is progressive. It sounds like the training that has been done with Focus Ireland staff will be exceptionally valuable and that it will revolutionise how Focus Ireland works with its clients.

To Ms Santoro, I was quite disappointed to hear that only three of the people who were surveyed had key workers working with them. I would be interested to hear about what Ms Santoro thinks are the hurdles to getting those key workers. We had the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, into the committee only an hour or so ago.

It had some very encouraging statistics around key workers. At this stage, all of the families with the DRHE have key workers and many of the individuals it is working with have a housing support worker. What challenges does the Mendicity Institution find and how do we break that down?

I fully endorse the recommendation around being able to more freely transfer from one local authority housing list to another. I note that the majority of the Mendicity Institution’s clients are not currently on a housing list and are not, therefore, eligible for accommodation. I ask for information on why people are not eligible and whether there are challenges we should be looking at from a policy perspective.