Dr. Dermot Kavanagh:

No. Some of the eight are represented in our figure of 17. Our figure is for people using our emergency accommodation and high-support housing, people in our housing first programme and people in our other supported housing programmes. One of the things I wanted to draw attention to, in particular, was that when we look at the people who were passing away and were in housing with support, the average age of death was 12 years older. I think one of the strongest findings is that the more unstable a person's housing situation, the more there is a risk of death. Problem drug and alcohol use increases substantially as well.

If we take housing first, we have around 80 people in these types of tenancies between counties Cork and Kerry. An awful lot of those would be people who had spent their lives homeless. Some of them would be at a relatively old age for homeless people. It is important to say that many of them started their lives as the traumatised children whom we now see in emergency accommodation. I can give an example of one man. He passed away in housing first accommodation. He had been in homeless services for more than 20 years and then he was housed. While he was in homeless services, he had hundreds of admissions into hospital for seizures and related conditions. After he was housed, however, he had no more seizures. He had visiting support from a medical team. The emphasis on housing, therefore, and the difference that housing makes to reducing the risk of death are important.