Mr. Mike Allen:

I think that is definitely part of it. I think it is a response to the huge, genuine pressure that local authority staff and the Department are under. They are asking if there is something they can do to make these people go away and go somewhere else. That is one pressure, and it is understandable, but it is the committee’s job to shape that into something meaningful.

The second part of it is the changing nature of Irish society. There are people we do not know, and who do not necessarily look like me or the rest of the people in this room, but they are now Irish. They are now increasingly becoming eligible for social housing and that is making other people wary. They are talking about a certain person and asking where they came from, because now they are in social housing. As far as I know, every single one of them is entirely entitled to social housing but the change in our society is happening so quickly that it has made people anxious. Instead of telling people that they understand why they are anxious and instead of saying the system is working and that a certain person is not jumping the queue, public representatives are saying they had better change the system because people are worried. Some sort of explanation should be given that, as our society changes, we will see people who have come from different backgrounds, have different accents and all the rest of it, and they will be in social housing, have jobs and be part of our society. That is something all of us have to celebrate and get used to. Public representatives need to be much more comfortable to say that while some of our systems are collapsing, some of them are working okay, so let us just concentrate on the ones that are not working, for example, by building enough social housing, rather than concentrating on the issues I described. Let us not feed into the anxieties that people have. Let us try to address them and make people more confident. This is a great country and we are doing many things well. Some of our public representatives should be much more progressive and assertive about that with some of the people who are getting a bit worried.