Ms Sorcha Farrell:

I will answer the Deputy's question on whether homeless families on transient sites were included in the count this year. We did not identify any families on transient sites in the count. We had one family on an unauthorised site, which was roadside.

The homeless figures are not included in the returns to the Department but we have committed to providing the figures to the LTACC on an annual basis because there is a significant number of Traveller families in homeless accommodation in the Dublin region.

The data that are provided by the DRHE give us that point-in-time information which is on the date of the count. A total of 135 households that were accessing emergency accommodation in the Dublin region on 24 November identified as Traveller households. Some 52 of those households on the night were in the Dublin city region. There were 28 single individuals and 24 families. There were 35 adults and 55 children constituting those families. In total, we had 118 individuals accessing emergency accommodation on the night of the count. As I said, those figures are unfortunately not included in the returns, but we do feed the information back to the LTACC.

In the past two years we have had a collective approach to gathering all the information. The Traveller representatives, the Traveller groups, and the TAU provide information on allocations and transfers. There are also the area housing managers and the area offices and then the social workers on our own team. We gather information from as many sources as possible and then we crosscheck all the figures to ensure that there is no double counting, in so far as is possible without breaching GDPR data protection.