Ms Emma Dolan:

On the co-ordination of services, there was a question on whether there was competition between the Usher's Island and Housing First services. We can sometimes have either-or responses to difficult or complex issues, and Ms Darcy explained what works in this regard. These things should be seen as part of a package and when somebody in a Housing First team needs treatment, somewhere like Usher's Island could work alongside that Housing First team to enable the person concerned to have his or her period of stability before coming back out into his or her home.

We were asked whether there should be a co-ordinating body to pull together the various agencies and elements of Government but I would find such a thing depressing because it would acknowledge that the mainstream was not working. There is a need for the mainstream to become more flexible and to adapt. If there was a need for a co-ordinating body it would need to have access to its own funding. I have worked with individuals with a disability or a mental health issue or who suffered from depression or came from a Traveller background and required a lot of social work input from many different Departments, and such people needed a package to be developed for them. We would have to go to social inclusion, disability or mental health services or primary care. Given the length of time it takes to negotiate these things, one has to ask where the funding would come from. All the time the individual's circumstances are getting worse and there is an even bigger job to do by the time one finally gets it all. There is a similar structure for dealing with vulnerable adults and any time one wants to put a package together, one has to go back and negotiate with the various departments in the HSE to do so. Any such body would need to be able to commission its own services. The risk is that it would operate separately from the mainstream, which would bring its own headaches.