Ms Mary Hayes:

Generally, the split in Dublin is close to 70% for private emergency accommodation. The NGO sector has not grown in Dublin, as Mr. Kelly noted earlier. The NGO sector does not feel it is in a position to take on or expand its capacity to develop new emergency accommodation services, notwithstanding the excellence of the services it provides. In terms of private emergency accommodation, this is on the same booking system as the NGOs and it is a system that we rolled out earlier this year. Our whole thrust is to try to make things more uniform because we have such a heavy dependence on private emergency accommodation in Dublin.

We do not have private security on any of the hostels, to my knowledge, although we did previously. There are some exceptions, for example, on the night of riots. There are different times when we might arrange for private security as an additional protection if we had concerns but it tends to be exceptional. We have private security on empty buildings but that is pretty much it.