Mr. Dermot Kavanagh:

May I come in on a few points? First of all, Deputy Harty raised a question about whether there is a link between the quality and extent of mental health and addiction services and the prevalence of homelessness. There is indeed and there is again very strong international evidence that where better services are in place fewer people become homeless. Most significantly, fewer people fall into the category of long-term homeless, so that is why it is essential in helping people to exit homelessness to have the services in place to sustain that.

That links to Deputy O'Sullivan's question in a way. Regarding local authority allocations and the whole issue of who provides housing for homeless people, one of the challenges is that people who are long-term homeless and have complex needs sometimes have a particular history and would fall foul of the scheme of letting priorities. It almost becomes the case that one is sentenced to homelessness for past misdemeanours or troubles in one's personal life. Getting around this and being able to give people a second chance to access housing and a way forward in their lives is crucial. In Waterford, for example, the local authority has allocated houses to South East Simon Community for its Housing First project, which is quite useful and one possible way of doing this.

Regarding who provides housing, whether it is our organisation as an approved housing body or whether it is the local authority or whoever, the bottom line for all of us in Simon is that somebody must provide housing for the people we serve. In Cork city we get practically nothing in allocations from the city council. Much of the reason for this is that we work with many single homeless people and many of the units are three-bedroomed and so on. Sometimes it is hard to house people because they have complex issues, and where nobody else will house them, we will house them. Measures should be taken, however, to ensure that people have access through social rental models, direct public housing or whatever other means. The priority in addressing homelessness is clearly to house homeless people, especially those who have been homeless the longest.