Ms Mary Hayes:

The Deputy raised this on a previous question. I feel we are comparing different things. There are the people we asked the trust to work with in terms of residential beds and also the cost of emergency accommodation in general, no matter who it is. If we went out today and did not have a supported provider - let us suppose it was the private sector - we would be lucky to get it for €20,000 a year. That is the reality of the cost of an emergency accommodation bed. With the trust, what we get is skilled and qualified workers on top of that, which is not what we have now. I appreciate that some of those are housing costs rather than emergency accommodation. The trust would be synonymous with working at the very sharp and pointy end of homelessness and with housing need. I can certainly say that in Dublin, they are working with acute need.