Mr. Sam McGuinness:

I will string a few of those questions together. In the greater Dublin area there are between 4,500 and 5,000 people, including children, homeless. The number of children is about 1,800; the number of parents of those children is about 1,200; and the number of single adults is 1,800, or nearly 2,000 if one adds the rough sleeper numbers given by Merchants Quay Ireland. This is a clear priority and therefore something needs to be done.

As Ms Randall and Mr. Kavanagh said, the longer people are homeless, the more issues they will have. The big problem we have in our detox facility on Ushers Island is getting people in there and getting them out to move on. There is shortage of move-on accommodation. The HSE cut our budget four, five, six or seven years ago by 22%. That has not been restored so we are still operating on that and trying to increase the services we offer. Ms Randall reminded me earlier when we were talking about this that the drugs initiative was cut by 37%. When the numbers are increasing all the time, the issues and the complexity will increase too. Nobody is better off in emergency accommodation, whether private emergency accommodation or any other kind of accommodation. This is not good for us.

Returning to the question of what more we would do, we have at present 100 units in the pipeline. We could probably get 125 people into those. We are a specialist housing association which is part of an organisation that delivers services. We are not in the big time; we are not providing thousands of units. Approved housing bodies, AHBs, are capable of providing more accommodation. The issue is that many of them have now been approved by the Housing Finance Agency. Land and then finding places to buy are the issues.

When we started three or four years ago, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and most of this is now gone. It is very difficult to find one-bed accommodation because it has not been built. We are doing what everybody else does with two-bed accommodation, which is getting people to share. For people to share, they need more supports because they must be made ready for it. The longer people are homeless, the more they forget many of their domestic skills. The support to live independently, SLÍ, process needs to be expanded to all areas because, at present, it is very much with the four local authorities in Dublin.