Dr. Dermot Kavanagh:

From the perspective of Cork Simon, our services are under intense pressure at the moment. A bit like Ms Hayes was saying, the reasons are twofold. There is an increase in the number of new presentations to services because prevention is not what it used to be, if I can put it that way. There is a greater difficulty in finding exits for people. Looking at the situation in the south west, we have seen a decrease in the number of homeless people in Kerry but a substantial rise in Cork, year-on-year. The number of people in emergency accommodation in Kerry decreased by about 54%. About one third of the decrease can be accounted for by tenancies in the Housing First programme in Kerry, which we are involved in. Similarly, in Cork city and county, we have 68 Housing First tenancies and those people would not have been going anywhere without that particular innovation. It has been very successful, with a tenancy sustainment rate of over 90%. If we did not have it, we would need another shelter of at least the size of Anderson's Quay in Cork.

Not everybody qualifies for Housing First and there is a need for innovations to provide housing for other groups who are homeless. We heard Mr. Stanley mention some of them. In Cork Simon, we have a growing number of people who we have to regretfully call the working homeless. They are people who are in employment, which no longer provides a route out of homelessness. Maybe my colleague from Limerick might say a bit about this. There is a lot of sense in looking at alternatives for people who are in work rather than using shelters such as ours, which is primarily focused on people with exceptionally high support needs. Where people have lower support needs, there can be innovative schemes such as that in Limerick, where a shared housing approach can be used.

As well as that, we are looking at shelter diversion. I mentioned Housing First as one of the successful initiatives in ensuring that homeless levels are not even worse than what they are. There is always room to look at what other countries are doing. Housing First is an example of a policy transfer from the United States and Finland. Supported shelter diversion is another initiative in the United States where one provides various types of support to people at the point at which they turn up at an emergency shelter to see if there is a safe alternative available for them and whether one can take a few simple steps that might prevent somebody from coming into the shelter in the first place. Where that has been done in Connecticut, presentations have been decreased by 17%.

We are deep in a crisis. The way out of the crisis ultimately involves the provision of additional housing. Many more units are coming down the track. In Cork, around 2,500 units are in planning and construction and otherwise coming down the track. If we take a triage approach and put as much as possible towards people, especially long-term homeless people, we can take pressure off the system. It is striking that of the 526 people who availed of Cork Simon's emergency shelter last year, 50 of them, which is 9%, accounted for 50% of the bed nights, which is 11,000 bed nights. Some 32 beds were occupied by long-term homeless people each night. Clearly, if we had even more beds via Housing First and similar schemes, we could prioritise those people for whatever housing is available, free up a lot of space and take a lot of pressure off services. As Ms Hayes said, it is prevention, housing-led, and doing what one has to do in the middle with emergency accommodation.