Mr. Pat Doyle:

The first thing we said today was that we need a national housing strategy to match the very welcome homeless strategy announced by the Minister. We need a housing strategy in order to ensure, or try to ensure, that we do not return to the failures of the past. The last boom did not work for homeless people as evidenced by the fact that the number of people homeless increased. During the boom we all knew people who had a second home and it was so prevalent that people thought they were doing something wrong by not having one. People felt inadequate if they could not claim to have a house in somewhere like Bulgaria and maybe one in Sligo as well. We do not want a return to that situation and we do not want incentives created to encourage people to start speculating again in the property sector. That is not what we are about and is why we want a housing strategy that includes all elements of social housing, particularly for families and people who are young or single.

We also want social housing for people with complex mental health needs who are never going to marry or have children but need to be housed in the community. We want to do that work alongside our colleagues in the local authority. We work closely with our local authority colleagues. Although they are extremely busy and swamped, as we all are, they are not out of their depth. However, they have been hampered by cuts in staff levels, embargoes and reduced budgets yet have the will and desire to bring about change. Nobody wants to be saying to people, "I can't do anything for you". The fact that people have said it shows how much the system has failed. The staff of the McVerry Trust, along with our local authority colleagues, do their best to alleviate the situation.

With regard to rents, the Minister announced about two years that she was reducing rents because they were falling and the market required it but now we need them to go back up again. We need rents to be linked with inflation. We need an index-linked rent system for the following reasons. It would allow us to control the market; it would not allow it to go bust; and it would allow people in desperate need to break into the market. It would also allow people who are in the market to stay put if they have not been given letters by landlords threatening that their non-payment of €200 next month, for example, which would leave them out on the street and push them into the homeless market.

Let us remember that it is the most chaotic and vulnerable people who get stuck in homeless services. We want to get families in and out of the system as quickly as possible. Nobody wants their kids going to school saying they are homeless and nobody wants their kids to travel 15 km either. We have a local housing strategy in place that we try to follow but it have been very difficult. We feel that the homeless response needs to be locally based which is what we have done. The trust has been given a contract to open a new hostel in south Dublin, the first in the south Dublin area. We pursued that strategy because we believe that homeless services should be based in the community.