Dr. Niall Muldoon:

Dr. Keilthy has outlined the strategy and the three pillars. For me, being brave is looking at this as a moment in time when we can get 2,200 families out of homelessness while underpinning the prevention stages. That is a change in the way we see it. Every time I bring this up, concerns are raised about people who are on the waiting lists for housing and who gets priority. People are worried that somebody in homelessness would get a house ahead of somebody else but we can easily define this as a real crisis that has never happened before. Before 2012, there was no family homelessness. Occasionally, a family would spend some time, three, four, five or six weeks, in bed and breakfast accommodation. For ten or 12 years now, the numbers of these families have been growing. The brave thing to do would be to say we are going to eradicate child and family homelessness in the next three or four years and that we will lift them all out while we are underpinning our prevention processes. We talk about taking back private ownership of emergency accommodation to create our own hubs. That is a good idea that will save money but it is essentially changing the pump on a sinking ship. You are getting a better pump but it will not stop us from sinking. Those families and children are sinking. We have to take them off the boat. We have to get them into their own houses as quickly as possible in a safe and consistent way and then make sure it never happens again. We are the third richest country in Europe and in the top 20 in the world but 20% of our children are still living in fear of poverty. We are about to tighten our belts again because of lots of other things that are happening. That is why this would be brave. We should look at these families as a one-off unit in an emergency situation and ask whether we can bring them all out as soon as possible.