Ms Mary Hayes:

They may have. You generally would have one person who is here. Say, for example, you have an unaccompanied minor who is here and who ages out. He or she will always have a social housing application at 18. They have a very restricted timeframe in which to apply for family reunification. It is much tighter now in terms of the family members for whom you can apply. They will have a live housing application. When other people join the housing application, your date of application stays. Therefore, it happens.

The difficulty is before people probably would have taken up HAP. I am sorry I sound like I am banging on about it but before there were more options for people to go into the private rented sector. I guess now, in terms of family reunification, we are still seeing some numbers. We are not seeing a great explosion in them. The numbers stay small but they are steady. There is a small number and we report on them every month in Dublin in the monthly report. We are seeing a small number, sometimes up to approximately four families in a month, through family reunification.