Mr. Niall Foster:

To begin with people who land in Ireland, whether through crisis or otherwise, the first point of engagement if someone is homeless is to present to his or her local authority for a homeless assessment. In our experience, what is happening across all local authorities at present is the conflation of a homeless assessment with a housing assessment. If someone is not eligible for social housing at that time and does not have a payment in place, there is a delay in that person accessing homeless accommodation. That has been a real issue for us. Whether it is families or single persons coming in, people have a window where they need support and accommodation. They will have to go through the process of trying to get a payment and producing documents to be able to get on the housing list just to access homeless accommodation. That is the first point regarding what we have experienced across the board.

On the level playing field and what we have experienced in respect of differences between the local authorities, we can all appreciate that Dublin has the highest number of homeless cases. It has a lot of experience dealing with those cases in comparison with other local authorities, but we have noticed that if someone is coming back to Ireland and he or she has to present to a local authority outside Dublin, there are cases where that person is sent back to Dublin to get homeless accommodation. If someone is coming into Ireland and getting a bus to Cork or Galway - this is not being specific to any local authority - in general that person is sent back to Dublin because he or she might not have had an address in that area for four, five, ten or 15 years. That local area is where the person would have last had an address and where he or she might have established ties, or not, in some cases, but the treatment of people is that they have to go to Dublin to be looked after because there are not enough homeless services or the resources to look after them.

We have a case example involving a family who emigrated in 2015 and arrived back to Ireland in 2020. Their business abroad had failed due to Covid and their last address was in a county council area in a Border county just outside Dublin. They were told that because they had not been made homeless in that county, they needed to find their own accommodation. In this case, it was lucky the family came back with savings allowing them to support their accommodation. It took 18 days for that family to be offered accommodation by the council after numerous efforts and advocacy by us. When they returned, the family was told they were not habitually resident and could not access homeless accommodation because they had lived abroad for five years. As we know, the habitual residency condition is part of social welfare legislation. I was not sure why that was applied in this situation, but it was a term that was used. Again, it was said that since the family did not become homeless in that local authority area, despite having lived there previously, they were not entitled to accommodation. It took a very long time. A self-accommodation option was given to them for a two-week period. The local authority paid for it for that two-week period and then told the family they had to move out because it could not afford to keep them in that accommodation. We had to continue advocacy. The family ran out of resources but eventually we got them assessed for homeless accommodation and it was given to them.

That was a lucky case for that family because they had the resources to be able to support themselves for the three or four weeks they were not provided with accommodation, but that will not be the case for many people, especially those returning in crisis. That is something we have experienced. There is a lot of pressure on the Dublin local authorities to accommodate people. The central placement service, despite that family technically not being its responsibility, facilitated them for a few nights just to get them over the hill. There is definitely a disparity in the treatment of families presenting as homeless when they return to Ireland.