Ms Anne Cronin:

The intensive family support service has been up and running for 11 years. It plays a preventive role as a tenancy sustainment service for families who may be at risk of homelessness or who are homeless. We work with families, many of whom are at crisis point, in their homes or private rented accommodation and try to put in place a preventive plan to ensure they will not become homeless and can stay in their current accommodation. This often involves working with parents to address issues they have and linking in with social workers. We advocate on behalf of parents if they are already engaged with social workers and assist them in attending conferences with them or on access visits if they are estranged from their children.

We also support Mum or Dad in all the different life skills needed to maintain their accommodation. We would link them in with addiction services, treatment services and MABS. It depends on the complex issues that any family is facing. We provide an individual package of supports tailored to that family to help them remain in their accommodation or, if at that crisis point where they have lost their accommodation, to access further accommodation be it private rented accommodation or social housing. More often than not it is private rented. It is becoming increasingly hard to respond in the preventative area as more often than not we have moved towards crisis management in that we have a long list of families who are waiting to receive a service from us. That is a new departure for us and it is not an issue we faced even three or four years ago. We now have a list of more than 30 families waiting at any one time to engage with our service. It is a powerful service in terms of the tenancy sustainment and the homeless prevention part but it needs to be well resourced in terms of the numbers coming to the service seeking support. There is a huge issue in terms of the increasing number of families who are becoming homeless and it is also an issue outside of Dublin. We have seen a rapid increase in Limerick. Also it is the only out-of-hours service in the city. When the homeless action team office closes in the evening we provide an out-of-hours service. If a family or a single person becomes homeless in the city at night or needs to access information or accommodation our family support service is an out-of-hours service that can be accessed. It tries to be as wrap-around as possible in that if one finds oneself homeless during the day or the night and needs to access bed and breakfast accommodation it is done through that out-of-hours service.